By; Sam Erikson According to historians Daniel Cohn and Roy Rosenzweig, digital history is the process of “gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the web.” It sounds simple, yet complex. However, if you utilize the historical tools and platforms that work for you, the possibilities for conducting digital historical work are endless. Going into … Continue reading Digital History: Learning to Gather, Preserve, and Present J. Horace McFarland and the Harrisburg Park Commission
Cities hold history in various forms. Some cities utilize murals to capture their past, others may use walking tours, but most city histories resides in archives and with local residents. Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, does not have the most accessible history. Due to my work with the Digital Harrisburg Initiative, I have spent an … Continue reading Mystery of McFarland
By Rachel Dougherty I sit down to write this final post in the midst of a hectic finals week. I’ve been busy taking cumulative exams and writing papers in an attempt to synthesize what I have learned over the course of the semester; but my Digital History final has looked a bit different. I was … Continue reading Digital History: A ‘Bridge,’ Enabling the Past to be Elevated in the Present
Featured image credits: Walnut and Short Looking North Toward Capitol, January 4,1918, Private Papers (Series MG-085-APRP-3, Box 1), MG-085, J. Horace McFarland Private Papers, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg. – By Kelan Amme When I first began taking Digital History in August of this year (2022), I expected myself to be learning about how the historical … Continue reading Historians Behind the Screen, Lens, Records Box, Database… A Semester’s Reflection on the Second Capitol Expansion
By Sam Erikson Going to The Pennsylvania State Archives and The Dauphin County Historical Society were both formative experiences for me over the course of this Digital History course. When my classmates and I traveled to The Pennsylvania State Archives together a few weeks ago, I was immediately overwhelmed by the vast amount of collections. … Continue reading Harrisburg Transformations: Digitization and Datification
The work of the Digital Harrisburg Initiative has produced dozens of faculty and student presentations and publications since 2015. Here we provide a sample of the scholarly work interpreting the history of Harrisburg and promoting the initiative. City Beautiful & Digital Public History This special issue of Pennsylvania History, edited by David Pettegrew and James … Continue reading Publications
The City Beautiful Exhibition features student and faculty projects exploring urban improvement in Harrisburg in the early twentieth century. The urban improvement movement began after Mira Lloyd Dock gave a public lecture in December 1900 lamenting the dire state of the city and advocating its potential for rebirth. Ultimately, a group of visionaries rallied the population to vote for a bond issue in 1902 to … Continue reading The City Beautiful
I have been involved with the Digital Harrisburg Initiative since January of 2018 and have had the opportunity to be involved in may different projects. Most of the writing I’ve been asked to do has been very independent (minus a few edits in post-production). Over the past year, however, I was able to contribute to … Continue reading Learning to “Do History”: Lessons in Collaborative Research and Writing
The team of students and faculty at Messiah College’s branch of the Digital Harrisburg Initiative have been hard at work for the past few months on a variety of different projects. Our on-going involvement in the Look Up, Look Out campaign and Commonwealth Monument project allows many different students to lend their voices to important … Continue reading New History: Updates on Digital Harrisburg
Three very informative and busy weeks later, our Digital History class is coming to a close. To wrap up the class, we put together a research project with the goal of “Rethinking City Beautiful.” After spending time reading an original source, newspaper articles, and illustrated texts about the City Beautiful Movement, it was time to … Continue reading Reflecting on the History of the Future
Digital Harrisburg 