Big News!
The Wabanaki Research Portal has been awarded a grant by the NEH!
Read more here, and stay tuned for more news as the project develops.
HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MAINE
The “Hidden UMaine” tour aims to highlight key people, moments and places in campus history that often go overlooked, including the experiences of the first students of color, early efforts to create inclusive student groups like Wilde Stein, or moments of unrest and violence. Sieber developed this digital tour with two former student fellows, Luke Miller and Elizabeth Dalton, and archivists at Fogler Library. The team built a prototype tour in Clio, a website and app that allows users to take the tour in person or virtually, with options to add sources, links, archival items, and an audio tour.
THE WELL READ PRESIDENT
The Well Read President is a virtual bookshelf timeline of the books President Theodore Roosevelt read during his first term as president, as an outdoorsman, a father, a historian, and politician. Created for the Theodore Roosevelt Center, it illuminates not only how books affected Roosevelt’s diplomacy and decisions as president, but also his relationships with his family and friends. The Well Read President is a featured digital classroom resource by the National Council on Public History. Click timeline below or blue title above to explore the virtual bookshelf.
VISUALIZING THE RED SUMMER
Visualizing the Red Summer is a research hub for the dozens of riots and lynchings that occurred in 1919 known as the Red Summer. The site includes a visual timeline of events using primary documents, an interactive map that allows users to look at trends among the riots, and the Red Summer Archive of difficult-to-find primary documents related to the riots that Sieber collected, all linked here in blue. These photographs, articles, telegrams and court documents are sortable by theme, location and type of document. Click the image below to enter the archive, using the ‘Filter By’ and ‘Filter Options’ drop-down menus to examine themes.
Read a piece Sieber wrote for the American Historical Association, “An Act of Tactical History” about creating the rogue archive and mapping the violence, or a recent article in The Conversation about a new Red Summer discovery Sieber made about a previously unknown incident of violence. VRS has been featured or cited by institutions including the National Archives, Library of Congress, Zinn Education Project, National History Day, Smithsonian, and the National Council on Public History, and is used in classrooms around the world. The American Historical Association also includes VRS on its resource list: The History of Racist Violence in the United States.
DIGITAL LORAY
Digital Loray documents and interprets the long, complex history of Gastonia, North Carolina’s iconic Loray Mill and the surrounding mill village. Named by the National Humanities Alliance as a “Humanities For All” site, Digital Loray uses digital tools and technologies to tell the human stories of this place, engaging members of the community as active participants. Sieber worked with a team in Gastonia for two years collecting community histories and creating an archive of documents, photos, ephemera, and oral histories. Following the creation of the digital archive, permanent exhibits were created in the history center in the renovated mill. Within Digital Loray, Sieber also built The Mill Village in 1920, an interactive map that documents the 2000+ residents of the Loray Mill Village in 1920 using data drawn from census records, city directories, and other sources. Enter the map by clicking the image below or blue title above.
*Note – The site is currently being redesigned on a new platform. Links may not be active.
CHICAGO AND THE GREAT WAR
Chicago and the Great War is a digital exhibit created by undergraduate students in Loyola University Chicago’s History department under Sieber’s direction, to work in concert with a faculty member’s curriculum. Students were tasked with creating mini exhibits on the WWI-related topic of their choosing in Chicago’s history, from how the war affected baseball and military training, to the experiences of both African American and immigrant troops. Using archival collections from throughout Chicago, they created not just the exhibit and website text and design, but tracked down the historic documents and photographs to feature (with permissions), designed an interactive digital map of the city during wartime, and decided how they wanted to promote the site on social media. The final product is 100% their creation. Use the dropdown menus on the site to explore their exhibits.
KAREN SIEBER 