Digital Media blog

Both of the articles main points instruct historians and archivists on gathering archival material through digital means, especially when tragedies and conflicts strike.  In “The Future of Preserving the Past”, Cohen explores the differences in how historians collected data for archives after Pearl Harbor, 1941, and September 11, 2001. He found that after Pearl Harbor, archivists used people’s letters and diaries to understand the feelings of the American public towards the attack on the Hawaiian naval base. Cohen finds a distinct difference in the way archivists find material for capturing the American opinion and reaction to the September 11 events, because a majority of the people use emails, blogs and websites rather than letters and diaries.  Therefore, the future in preserving past events lies in digital media. Brennan and Kelly look at the importance of digital archives and the need to make them accessible to public audiences so the public can retrieve and input information into the databases easily.  The authors find that people will input information into a digital archive only if the people do not find the website confusing and difficult to use. In their archive over Hurricane Katrina, Brennan and Kelly find that a website that people find accessible and well-organized allows for more entries. However, resources in digital archives are limited to the population who own the technology and have the desire to contribute to the archives. Despite the downsides of digital archives, I believe that technology in current years is becoming more available to the general public. More and more people store their personal information online and a majority of people access information through online sources. Therefore, digital media is relevant, not necessarily just in disaster areas, and historians will continue to create them. It is important that historians make sure that their websites provide easy access and try to include as many perspectives in their entries as possible in order to make a complete archive, especially over key events that pertain to the nation as a whole.

Hollywood and History Blog

This week’s readings discuss historical presentations involving the use of film, in a large production to documentaries. In A Shared Authority, Frisch argues to include more use of oral histories in documentaries in order to show a variety of perspectives about an historical event. He uses the case study of the documentary Vietnam in order to explore ways that filmmakers use oral histories to tell a story. He finds that filmmakers make choices over who they conduct oral histories with and which histories they include into the documentary, and argues that directors need to include a wider range of oral histories in films to widen the film’s story.

 In the chapter “Watching The Civil War” by Glassberg, he discusses the validity and effectiveness of Burn’s documentary series on PBS The Civil War. In terms of effectiveness, Glassburg claims that Burn’s reaches a vast amount of people including “during the week of its initial broadcast –nearly one-sixth of the total United States television audience- saw at least one segment of the film.”(Glassburg 92, 2001) Therefore, because of the popularity of television, Burn’s was able to reach a wider audience than formal types of public history presentations in order to educate the population on topics such as the American Civil War. However, Glassburg explores the historical accuracy of the documentary by questioning if it reached all types of audiences and also academic historians criticize the film for its lack of focus on specific social issues such as women’s roles.

Robert Toplin in his article, “Cinematic History”, goes over historians who study “film’s treatment of history” and how films relate to their audiences. Toplin discuss the political role of films by looking at how films that present a history from the past sometimes deal with issues in the present. He uses the example of the film Bonnie and Clyde, made in the 1960s, which is a film made about the 1920s couple that portray characteristics of “anti-establishment, rebellious and independent minded” that people could relate too in the 1960s. The author also makes the point when researching films, the historian must look at the filmmakers’ objectives and put them into a historical context. Researchers have to look at the creation of the film as well as the final product when putting a film into perspective.

Natalie Davis’s article looks at a specific case when filmmakers cannot include new challenging historical information in films because of popular opinion. Sometimes historical accuracy is lost because of the desire for a popular movie. Filmmakers, especially in popular movies, will retell a story in a historical context, but leave out facts and information important to the story. Therefore filmmakers do not always achieve a level of objectivity in retelling historical events and most films should be looked at as fiction. But, films do provide a perspective about what they tell and do not tell and historians can look at films to come up with the popular opinion of an issue for a time period.

Week 12 Blog: Oral History and Public Memories

The reading for this week, Oral History and Public Memories, discusses how oral histories can capture different viewpoints of a nations or groups history. The authors, Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, break the book into three parts: the first discusses how governments or groups can use oral histories to create a national identity, the second shows how oral histories from groups cause a sense of identity, and the third focuses on oral history projects that hope to create change in the local community. The first two chapters of the book about the Aboriginal people of Canada and the creation of the national identity of Singapore go against what I usually think of as an oral history project. I usually find oral histories capturing voices that historians or governments have left out of texts, but in the chapter over Singapore the author discusses how the new government only sought the voice of public officials and important people that helped create the new Singapore. It was not till much later that the government started allowing the oral historians to officially seek interviews with the masses. The government only allows interviews with certain people in order to secure one story about the independence of Singapore from colonialism.

Thankfully the chapter over South Africa in post-apartheid Cape Town told a different story. The author presents two different communities oral history projects that discuss life and memory during the apartheid regime in their community. The author found that the two communities held very different memories during the regime because of the ethnicity of the community and their location. This chapter not only shows the benefits of oral histories among populations that experience discrimination, but also shows that people’s memory differs and is multi-dimensional in countries depending on areas, ethnicities and other things.

The third part of the book shows interesting stories of how people use oral histories to try and make change in communities. I thought the chapter over the Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project by Daniel Kerr is unique and innovative because the author hopes to allow for homeless people of Cleveland to tell their story and give them a voice. The project allows for the homeless people to confront issue of Cleveland’s urban policies of wiping out poor neighborhoods and creating buildings designed to promote tourism that leaves a lot of people homeless. After the conclusion of the interview, I found that the people grew confident that the public heard their voice and some homeless people were willing to confront city officials about the conditions of shelters.

week 11 post

Archive Stories by Antoinette Burton focuses on archives and in particular researchers’ experiences at archives as well as how archives change over time. The book is broken up into three parts: stories of researchers at archives, examples of how archives are built and why archives matter. The book has an overarching theme of collecting stories of historians’ experiences in different archives across the world which is especially the case in the first chapter by Durba Ghosh in her encounters in the British and Indian archives. The author speaks to how she found two different interpretations about Indian women and British men relations in the two archives. She states that Britain recognizes that these relations occur, but there is little to no document evidence and names are left out of the equation. Britain’s purpose of their archives with India exists to show the superiority of British imperialism at the time. Also it excludes a majority of lower classes and local Indian women perspectives. On the hand, the research aids at the archives in India question the author’s topic and deny that women slept with British men and the only kind of women to participate in these acts were Muslims. The Indian archive tries to preserve a national identity free of British involvement. Her experiences show an interesting look at how colonialism in perceived in different countries.

                I found Peter Fritzsche chapter on the history of the German archive particularly interesting in how in changes from World War I to World War II. At first the archive worked towards a democratic and inclusive outlook in order to gather the history of World War I from the perspective of all German citizens, but in World War II the archives are mended to support the views of the Third Reich causing various populations to be left out of the archive and records is destroyed. This chapter shows how an archives original purpose of representing the whole population can change the archives mission and outcome.

                A third goal of the book shows why archives are important and one author speaks of her research in South Africa during the fall of Apartheid about the Soweto Uprising. The South African archive saw trouble when people tried to erase the Apartheid years from the archive and some records were destroyed. The archive plays an important role in collecting oral histories about the Soweto Uprising of what different people remember about the Uprising in the 1970s, which added new perspectives to the archive, rather than just government reports. The archive has the purpose of being a place, after the end of Apartheid that allowed people a place to tell their stories of the event.