When I first registered for Messiah's first ever digital history class, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I originally signed up not knowing anything about this emerging field. All that I knew was that my adviser and the chair of the history department had both told me that I should take … Continue reading Into the Woods
The school year is drawing to a close, and as I look back on the semester, I can see many connections between Digital History and a course that I took last semester, Public History. During my public history class, we read the book Recent Themes on Historians and the Public in our exploration of the … Continue reading Digital History as Public History
Researching the City Beautiful Movement gave me so much more appreciation for the city of Harrisburg. I really knew nothing about it, being from New Jersey; it took me until I was in middle school to even realize that it was the capital of Pennsylvania! My sister moved there about that time, and, honestly, the … Continue reading Shedding a Whole New Light on Harrisburg
Digital History is opening my eyes to the different avenues that students can use to understand history. As an aspiring Social Studies teacher, this course has given me a new way to make history more enjoyable for both middle and high school students. Two weeks ago, some fellow students and I gave presentations about other digital … Continue reading Local History Taught Through Digital Harrisburg
Taking the new Digital History course at Messiah College has been an interesting ride. The course had many ups and downs, which can be expected for a brand new course. Both we, the students in the class, and Dr. Pettegrew were trailblazers for a course devoted to learning the new side of history, the digital … Continue reading Becoming Trailblazers
As you know, our time working on the City Beautiful Project is coming to a close. I have been researching Mira Lloyd Dock for my part of the project. My research was fully conducted at the Pennsylvania State Archives. Searching through boxes of personal family papers, journals, reports, speeches and letters, it quickly became apparent that … Continue reading Mira Lloyd Dock Beyond City Beautiful
One of the exciting outcomes of the class project to key US census records is an enormous database of names, occupations, and demographic attributes for Harrisburg in 1900. As I discussed in a previous post, we keyed 28,397 individuals – about 57% of the total population of the city – into a Microsoft Access table. … Continue reading City Social: The Population of Harrisburg, 1900
As the semester winds down, we are beginning to finalize our Omeka websites. My group is focusing on the Campaign for Improvement, specifically the preliminary stages of the City Beautiful Project in Harrisburg. I am responsible for documenting the harmony and opposition against and/or for this campaign. Most of the primary sources I have discovered came … Continue reading Fairy Tales and Youth: The Campaign for Improvement
Here at Messiah College, the first day of finals starts on May 9th. That leaves our class with only about 2 weeks to finish our City Beautiful project. Although the depletion of time has caught us all a little off guard, we certainly are proud of what we've done. Besides the City Social project, which we … Continue reading We’re Not Done Yet
Growing up in the digital age, my generation has been incredibly spoiled by our computers. After spending some time in the Pennsylvania State and Dauphin County Historical Society archives, I feel as though I have been researching with training wheels all of my life, and while the safety of training wheels is comfortable, researching without … Continue reading Losing the Training Wheels
