Tag: Blog Post

Skill 7 Blog 9

For centuries music has been an autobiographical tool to remember. It has been used to pass on information, gather support, or to lament the passage of time and what once was. This was particularly apparent when perusing the Library of Congress Archives. All of the music I listened to was a part of the California Gold collection, an anthology of folk music from Northern California from the 1930s, which highlighted the migrant experience.

During this time period music became a powerful political statement that captured the ideas of the Popular Front. This was a coalition of left leaning organizations that was under girded by the communist party, socialists and independent leftists. When this political movement eventually crumbled and dissolved its underlining tenets remained embedded in the literature, movies, and music of the time. This Cultural Front was led by “black, left, and labor dissenters-who-organized in a newly conducive climate”1
and eventually led the country into the long civil rights era.

A majority of folk music from this time is a direct reflection of the lives those people lived, the hope they had, the hardships they faced, the religions they clung to2 , and their homesickness. The dust bowl drove a lot of people west in hopes of work and that was reflected in the music that was recorded. A number of songs ” depicting California as a veritable promised land“3 4
enticed workers and the mythology surrounding the west became a part of the popular culture.

Having these more personal moments shared through music had a unifying cultural effect because it underscored that many people were experiencing the same things. Although it was well known that impacts of the great Depression were widespread, hearing it sung to you has a different effect. In this way folk music was both a mirror, reflecting the shared trials of life, and a magnifying glass, broadcasting the widespread problems of inequality, dislocation, and joblessness.

Beyond immortalizing the pain of a generation, music was also used to bolster the spirits of the people. Migrants living in labor camps were able to recount stories of their homes, and commune with others. In current popular culture you can see direct link to how music way used back then. At times music is a tool with which to disrupt the system, while at other times music becomes a little bit of oblivion to make life a bit more tolerable.

Blog Post – Image Analysis

I knew that I wanted to use a color photograph for this assignment, so when I went to browse through the collections at our disposal I was immediately drawn to the bright colors present in the image. I was also drawn to the expressions of the children, and what I considered a very classic setting—a state fair. It is a beautiful and simple scene, but full of chaos, and those qualities piqued my interest. I feel like the focus on the children is unique—often we focus on the lives of those who had already reached adulthood by the time the Great Depression hit, but I liked that this photographer chose instead to focus on the children who were born during that time, and who were growing up at a turning point in American history.

One of my lingering questions about the photograph is what the context surrounding the fair was like. The focus on this one moment of festivity might potentially create a harsh contrast at the return to daily life, or perhaps it could not. The children pictured in the photograph are dressed up in clean, matching outfits, likely their Sunday best, and it is obvious that some effort was put into presentation when their family decided to attend the State Fair. I feel that this may harbor some yet-unexplored cultural implications–how important were community events like this to people at the time? How does the importance (or lack thereof) compare to current trends?

Modern American society is heavily digital, and heavily reliant on digital images for everything from research material, to social interaction. I would even dare to hypothesize that just as a family may have put on their best clothes to present themselves at a community event, such as the pictured fair, that modern-day Americans practice the same meticulous self-framing to present themselves well in digital media every single day. As an anthropologist I am naturally curious about the seemingly inherent drive to look good to others, and although my main focus in my image analysis itself operates around the themes of nostalgia and romanticization, I think that it is interesting as well to look at the consistency of American culture’s relation to self-image, which is depicted through the figures in this photograph.

Links:

Omeka Item – http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/191
Omeka Exhibit – http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/francesca-reimer—at-the-verm

Works Cited:

“Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs – About This Collection.” About this Collection – Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (Library of Congress). Library of Congress, January 1, 1970. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsac/.

Jack. “At the Vermont State Fair, Rutland.” Home. Library of Congress, January 1, 1970. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017877403/.

Blog Post #1

From what we’ve covered so far about the New Deal and the Great Depression in class, it seems to me that the era was really a culmination of technologies. I like the similarities between the silent raves we have today and the silent radio dances people would have back then. It shows how cyclical history can be and how ideas are often re-purposed for new generations. In a similar manner, we had computers back then that gathered information through punch cards. Now, we have workable interfaces and a screen which hides all the background information. I am really interested to learn about the different forms of entertainment employed during this time to increase morale and how people reacted to such productions. What songs people liked, favorite singers, movies and actors and actresses. Just like with the silent raves, I would like to see in a juxtaposition of the modern era to then just what has been re-purposed or modified and developed from the 30’s that we use today as entertainment. As for Digital Humanities, I also find it to be a very interesting field of study. I personally like how Digital Humanities makes access to previous cultures much more digestible. Like with the Negro’s Green Book, it was interesting to see what places were considered safe for black people to visit at the time. We have also brought using the Library of Congress’s information in our work, so I am greatly interested to see how that will turn out.

The project I was assigned to parse and study was The Berkeley Revolution. This site is effectively and exhibit that shows off primary sources which influenced the articles created and is termed as a digital archive, boasting a collection of clippings of articles from the seventies based in Berkeley, California. I think the benefit of using this sort of setup allows for information to be easily digested by someone who comes to the site and they have access to sources which each individual writer used to help the stories they wanted to share about how important this city was in the seventies. Their sources include many newspaper clippings, letters and various photos of events and accounts from that time period of the city. The diversity of the sources really helps paint a big picture. In the About Page of the site, the creators want to show a communication between the sources, which I feel further proves my point of using the sources to paint a big picture of how ideals from the sixties were brought to the forefront in the seventies. Similar to how Posner described in her video with the Negro’s Green Book, data can be digitized. In that project, the creators likely geo-coded the points to show their information. What the UC-Berkeley students worked on was digitizing the information they uncovered from what they describe as “official and unofficial” sources, which lead me to believe they covered a variety of databases and maybe were able to get in contact with families and information distributing companies in order to complete their research. Digitization leads me into my next point: Presentation. The students created a digital archive, making this information web accessible. By means of digitization and using this presentation option, the students were able to make this information accessible to a wide audience. This is great because the topic they are focusing on is seldom heard of or discussed, even for me. What the students did that I really liked is making articles and putting their sources below which shows credibility to the source and makes for an easily digestible interface. They even had graphic design contributions and used www.flaticon.com  to generate icons through Google.

Sources

“About The Berkeley Revolution.” The Berkeley Revolution, revolution.berkeley.edu/about/.

Miriam. “How Did They Make That?” Miriam Posners Blog, 1 Feb. 2014, miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that/.

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