As many students have already posted, our Digital History class is currently working on two different projects related to the history of Harrisburg and its past residents, which are “City Social” and “City Beautiful”. Each of these projects is our way of getting to know more about this city and its history. The first project … Continue reading From City Social to City Beautiful
1899 Harrisburg. The city was falling apart. There were talks of the Capital of Pennsylvania being moved. From all of this emerged a female leader determined to transform the city into the beautiful place she knew it could be. Mira Lloyd Dock was this proactive woman who saw the potential in Harrisburg. The City Beautiful movement … Continue reading City Beautiful and the 1900 Census
When our class began to discuss Harrisburg history and digitization, I thought I would be ready for the onset of information. Of course, there is so much more to learn, but I knew thousands of early 20th-century Harrisburg residents by name and worked comprehensively with digitizing historical Harrisburg. That’s a good base, right? Similar to … Continue reading Expanding the Narrative of a Beautiful City
For those who did not read my last blog pot, I introduced myself and also explained how I was entering into the vast discipline that is digital history. I took emphasis in the “vertical integration”, so to speak, of digital history; and how it is used for each aspect of digital history; from research, digitization, … Continue reading From Archive to Online: Digitizing The City Beautful
For our first project, we were each asked to choose The Patriot newspaper articles, from among those we’d previously collected, and analyze what they tell us about Harrisburg’s “campaign for beauty.” As a class, our hope is that this brief study will provide us with a better understanding of the progress of this movement and how … Continue reading Ask Not What Your [City] Can Do For You…
No movement can be successful without a group of people willing to lead the charge, to organize events and inspire people to action. Thus, the ways in which reformers interact with the public and with each other can say a lot about the change the reformers created. This holds true for the Campaign for Improvements … Continue reading The City Votes: Spatial Influences of the Reformers
It is 10:21 AM, and Messiah College’s first Digital History class is now officially ending. During our final meeting time this morning, students have been busily working in groups on final projects. We’re releasing our content to the world now and concluding this first chapter of directing our energies toward a Digital Harrisburg. Here is … Continue reading Harrisburg the Beautiful
As a North Carolinian, I never considered learning about the history of Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania. However, after enrolling in Digital History this semester, I have appreciated learning about the city of Harrisburg in the 20th Century. Despite our focus on Harrisburg in the late 19th Century and earliest 20th Century, we were able to … Continue reading Oh Harrisburg the 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
The Harrisburg City Social Project offers a fine-grained picture of the people and buildings of Harrisburg and Steelton, Pennsylvania, between 1900 and 1930. Launched in Spring 2014 to complement the City Beautiful Project, history and geospatial technologies students from Messiah College and Harrisburg University of Science and Technology input information from the 1900 federal census into a database, and linked it to digitized … Continue reading City Social
Digital Harrisburg 