fall_2019 – The Digital Past Course Blog

Mapping, Farrey

Creating this map was a very interesting experience. Reading the book was quite difficult as the print was very small and it just wasn’t what I expected. Most modern guide books have a lot more notable tourist attractions, these books didn’t seem to exactly do that. Yes they went into the history of the town and area, but they give little recommendations on what to do there or what there was to see.

Although this assignment wasn’t exactly what I was expecting it definitely was a very interesting learning experience. I definitely agree with Sarah Bond after doing this project. Mapping these historical locations or any point of historical importance can be extremely useful for preserving and teaching history. If anything, these maps are becoming even more important as some of these locations no longer exist due to various causes.

Mapping and Spatial history are extremely important when developing land, by having access to these primary sources we can be able to tell if the land needs to be assessed by an archeological team first to preserve the history of the land. I believe this important skill can really help us to avoid situations that many European countries often face when building. Often times we hear of European countries accidentally unearthing historical site and destroying some very interesting finds, I believe more interest in spatial history and mapping primary sources could prevent that in the United States.

The projects encased in the Green Book collections are only the tip of what we could accomplish with the plethora of primary sources we have. People could even make these maps with online tools like I had done for this assignment. Of course the maps made by the people on the Green Book Project (as seen above) looked much better compared to mine.

The Green Book version of my tour definitely looks more professional then mine and didn’t take the exact path I did, but both versions could be useful. There was one thing I did notice while looking over the Green Books maps though, there was a lot of segregation going on during the times these were made. Most guide books probably won’t take into account that fact and would most likely cater to white Americans.

Travel must have been so much more difficult for people of color during that time. I never even thought about that possibility until I looked over these maps. It really goes to show how different things were back then. Of course black and white travelers could probably take the same route but they might not have been allowed in the same restaurant or get the same quality of service where they went.

That is another reason I appreciated the opportunity to look at the Green Book project, it opened my eyes to that factor. That is something I never would have noticed without looking at those maps, and I think it’s important to recognize the struggles people went through and learn from them. That way we don’t end up repeating the past.

Citations:

Bond, Sarah. “Mapping Racism And Assessing the Success of the Digital Humanities.” History From Below, October 20, 2017. https://sarahemilybond.com/2017/10/20/mapping-racism-and-assessing-the-success-of-the-digital-humanities/.

“ILLINOIS A DESCRIPTIVE AND HISTORICAL GUIDE : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive. A.C.MCLURG & CO., January 1, 1970.

“NavigatingThe Green Book.” Navigating The Green Book. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://publicdomain.nypl.org/greenbook-map/.

Reflection

Exhibit: Artistic Expression in the Great Depression

My exhibit, Artistic Expression in the Great Depression, explored the ways that the struggles of the Great Depression were reflected in creative works at the time, such as plays, music, novels, film, murals, and dance. Using the digital tools we’ve worked with in class helped me to discuss both the purposes and the impact of these works.

When discussing Clare Leighton’s art work, using image annotation helped to talk about the particular portions of the work in their own contexts. It also saved the trouble of explaining and describing where each component of the work could be found. Using Soundcite to provide an immersive experience into Mary Sullivan’s song, “Sunny California”¹ helped to put one into the same perspective of someone hearing it at the time, someone who would hear their own story in the song and find comfort in solidarity. I prefer StoryMap over the other tools that we’ve used, as it helps you visualize different types of information at once. Using StoryMap helped me to show the location, description, and medium of several different kinds of creative works. Despite being of very different natures, StoryMap allowed the information for each topic to be shared in the same context, as a moment in history. These tools helped me to really make my point in explaining how the creative works of the 1930’s helped the nation heal.

Of course, I only found myself to be proving what we’d been learning all along this semester. We even read early on in the class, “The arts can be a lifeline as well as a pleasant diversion, a source of optimism and energy as well as peerless insight, especially when so many people are stymied or perplexed by the unexpected changes in their world. As our troubles worsen, as stress morphs into anxiety and depression, we may desperately need the mixture of the real and the fantastic, the sober and the silly, that only the arts can bring us.”² Now, if not for this class, I wouldn’t understand the concept lying underneath that determination. We were quickly directed towards the concept of escapism; and to understand how a nation suffering hardship across the board needed revitalization and found it in a mix of avoidance and activism. While Federal One Projects sought to begin mending society by creating cultural stimulation,³ seemingly a distraction from the task at hand, they didn’t just provide a diversion from the present circumstance, contrary to initial belief. “The most durable cliche about the arts in the 1930s is that despite the surge of social consciousness among writers, photographers and painters (some of it supported by federal dollars), the arts offered Depression audiences little more than fluffy escapism, which was just what they needed. But that’s not the whole story.”⁴

What we’ve learned throughout this class and what I’ve tried to show through my exhibit is that by looking closer at those arts projects that were condemned as a silly waste of federal funding, those involved were inspired to use the works for a bigger purpose; to seek out works that put issues under a floodlight. The nation was not only given back a sense of optimism through the “distraction,” but was motivated by the call to action that lie in so many of the arts projects being examined and produced at the time. It raises the thought of how often we may come into this possible paradox today, in getting caught up in entertainment news rather than considering pressing issues. Or can we justify that today by arguing that perhaps the news that entertains us sometimes points us back in the right direction, to the matters at hand?

Aside from what we’ve learned in this class in historical perspective, I’ve personally found a wealth of knowledge in understanding my relationship with the technological world. While I’ve considered how to navigate digital space carefully and safely, and take precautions in my usage, I hadn’t considered my duty to the digital world. Learning how to be responsible about engaging with suspicious information⁵ and possible bots⁶ has opened my mind to a different perception of the Internet. Everyone likes to wonder what the future will look like for technology, but I was slow to realize that all of us will really be the keepers of Internet safety, that we are all responsible for the future of the digital world.

The Mexican Migrant Experience

What did the Lomaxes want to learn about Latino migrants during the Great Depression from their songs? John and Ruby Lomax were aware of the plight of the Hispanic migrants, and recorded some of their songs in the late 30s. Never accepted in America, never accepted in Mexico when local governments deported them, and subject to unjust deportations, the Mexican-Americans of the 1930s became an entire “lost Generation… people that were lost in Mexico, people without the documentation, people that were denied their right to a life as an American.” ¹ Even so, Mexican immigrants had a significant stake in America, as they “had long been an integral part of agricultural production in the United States and were not newcomers on the scene even in 1940. In fact, when the Dust Bowl families arrived in California looking for work, the majority of migrant farm laborers were either Latino or Asian, particularly of Mexican and Filipino descent.” ²

Mexican migrants had to transition from “workers [that] were regarded as essential” during the 20s to aliens, “regarded as foreign… unwanted… not supposed to be here” during the 30s. Families had to cope with the greater scale of deportations that followed. All this translates into the songs John and Ruby Lomax recorded as a shocking chipperness. The migrant lullabies and children’s melodies are playful, frequently implementing sunny patters ³ and colourful lyrics ⁴. The Lomaxes and the Mexican singers chose to record the songs from the latter’s childhoods, songs designed to convey happiness and positivity to the youth, having nothing to do with ugliness or Mexican migrants’ situation. Buoyant songs glow ⁵ when compared to the African-American lullabies the Lomaxes recorded, which, perhaps in a truer but more weathered reflection of the era, are far more bluesy and sombre and quiet. ⁶ ⁷

John and Ruby Lomax, along with the migrants who lent their voices for the project, seemed to want to convey the good feelings of a traditional childhood, not the very real malaise that came from the Great Depression. The lullabies of the migrants speak of sweet fruits and hugs ⁸ and covering up from the cold, a joyful little habitat away from the oppression buffeting Mexicans from all sides. I believe the folk lullabies the Lomaxes wanted the nation to remember are keenly related to the popular escapism propagated by the broader arts, performing the role of “a lifeline as well as a pleasant diversion, a source of optimism and energy as well as peerless insight” for underprivileged Mexican families. ⁹

Special Collections Visit

Archives contain data meant to be kept forever, documents and photos and other things that researchers place enough stock in to warrant preservation. Obviously, scholars place value in archives– if a piece of data is in an archive, then by definition it must hold some use– but when I thought about how the general public would access archives, the utility grew murkier. I suppose that this is an archive’s chief mission: to appeal to the public so it can get the donations it needs to survive. The archivist for George Mason University’s special collections explained that her archive relies on donors.

The stark processing priorities surprised me very much from the “archival work [requiring] an ethics of care for the deeply personal and the deeply political” Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez espoused. What was most shocking is that sometimes, data donations are not always wanted for the archive. They are accepted because the donor has generously donated money, but mostly, they are irrelevant. An archive’s information is not just the biggest open books in the world, I discovered, but it is beholden to donors and just what data is actually available.

What archives digitise– the information deemed valuable enough to really be available for the general public, not hidden in basement boxes only to be seen by tenacious literati– is limited, too, often just for copyright issues. Thus, most of the digitised items are non-copyrighted photos. It made me realise just how much data I’ve yet to expose myself to. Most of my primary source research is done digitally, and when I found out just how few primary sources are realistically able to be digitised, I wondered about the limitations of some of my most ordinary research; in other words, “Who gets to be remembered and historicized by way of record creation? Who is forgotten or purposefully silenced in history by way of omission or destruction of records? How are records themselves… used to communicate misguided notions of holistic representation, truthfulness, neutrality, and objectivity?” ¹

Our examination of the real data provided me with context for the period, what it would feel like handling these materials. Before, the Federal Theatre Project existed as a vague notion in my head, but the plethora of physical data we interacted with tethered that notion to earthly materials. It shouldn’t have mattered as much as it did, but I found another dimension added to my mental picture of the Federal Theatre Project, considering what these data would be like with the awareness and physicality of objects directly around me. The documents themselves that I looked into helped me understand just what “the integration of the theater with community life in the smaller communities” meant (before it became a ‘secondary air’), painting a picture of mobile theatres and the incredible innovations people put out. The documents helped me feel the elation of those government officials trying to stretch their craft to the American hinterlands, and clued me into what might’ve been frustration when FTP officials “encountered ignorance and intransigence when they made their ‘courtesy calls’ on state administrators.” ²

Black Interviewees

For my analysis, I wanted to capture the priorities of black people during the Depression. I asked myself, “What did black interviewees want to talk about? What did black writers seek in their interviews?”, basing my question off Maryemma Graham’s statement that “the largest single impact on black writing before the civil rights movement was really the WPA, not the Harlem Renaissance.” I was not able to glean as much as I wanted from the side of the writers, but within their interviews remained a healthy cache of information about the experience of black folk. ¹

In my initial research, I began with specific black authors– namely Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison– whom I knew were in the Writers’ Project. I slimmed down my scope to smaller interviewers, authors that were not black but had excellently interviewed black people. I ended up with a decent corpus featuring all sorts of writers interviewing black men and women about their experiences.

In squaring my interviews up to the broad sources, I hoped to compare and contrast what black interviewees wished to discuss and what general interviewees wished to discuss. Thanks to Voyant’s extensive customisation options, it was quite simple to sift useless observations out of the results (dialect words, common words).

Something that truly fascinated me was that in the broader corpus, there were far more references to time and time periods. ‘Time’ and ‘year’ are two of the most prevalent words throughout the broad corpus– contrasted to the very few times ‘time’ or ‘year’ crops up in the work of the black writers. I was surprised how intuitively Voyant enabled this comparison, and how many avenues existed for me to deduce it. In closely examining my corpus, the interviewees would either talk about their general experiences (without mentioning dates) or specific events in their lives.

I also noticed that by far the biggest topic in my corpus was race. ‘Negro’ and ‘white’ were the most mentioned words, and according to Voyant, the most correlated with one another. However, within those documents, they were used just as signifiers (‘this man was a negro’) and seldom spoken of in a politicised manner. ‘White’, however, is more often used in politicised contexts (which is also where ‘negro’ and ‘black’ are most politicised). Racial terms are not included at all in the broader corpus.

I discovered that change was not a theme in black discourse. As the collective minds of American Yawp put it, “The Negro was born in depression. [The Great Depression] didn’t mean too much to him… Black workers were generally the last hired when businesses expanded production and the first fired when businesses experienced downturns.” The African-Americans of the 30s did not have the fiery rhetoric of their descendants in the 60s, and were often focused on their own lives, the joys and strifes laying there.

Mrs. Laura Smalley

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While Laura Smalley obviously suffered during her childhood as a slave, those recollections seem to be more distant to her. What she really recalls is the preachers, who “preached better then… now they [preach] by scripts most of the time. But then… they just preach, preach by the spirit”, or how they would cut and dry grass to make good bedding. The larger sufferings still remain, but Mrs. Smalley couldn’t remember any abuse that she herself took. ¹ Nor could she talk about slaves being sold like cattle, stating “us children never did know that, you know. We heard talk of it, but then I reckon that was after, after slavery I reckon.” It seems that slaves placed a high value on their children, on their community, and sought to shelter their children from its horrors. Of course, the horrors still shone through to her, such as when the plantation’s mistress beat a woman slave in the peach orchard and snuffed out a pipe on her skin; young Laura recalls having to grease her back afterward. ²

Laura was immune to monumental things like the end of Reconstruction, the labour reforms of Teddy Roosevelt, World War I, or the Great Depression’s onset, existing as mere gaps in memory. The tectonic shifts in America reached Laura and her community much slower than I would’ve expected; when the Civil War ended, her master didn’t even tell his slaves that they were free for six months (nor did any slave owner in Texas until Juneteenth). Even the race riots in the area passed by Laura; I was surprised that she was swift to recall “when colored folk [killed] one another for a while… Women killing other women about they husbands”, making me think the events are related. ³ ⁴

No community is immune to every social or political change, so I quickly deduced that the omissions of major happenings were Mrs. Smalley’s error. Throughout the interview, she came off as addled, and I frequently sympathised with the interviewers who kept angling their questions for meaningful answers– only for Laura to confess she knew nothing about what they were asking. Though I found value in hearing just what daily life consisted of for those enslaved– the oral account allowed for inflections and repetitions of speech to tell the story, elements I appreciated– there is a big asterisk next to that value concerning Laura’s advanced age.

I was fascinated by the interviewers’ frequent interjections. The Faulks remained professional, but when Mrs. Smalley went into detail about the treatment of some slaves, they never failed to exclaim ‘Good God’ or an assenting grunt. They added a very human element to their part, making the interview a true conversation. It made a difference to Laura, too, as she eventually grew more comfortable in how she spoke. While a transcript would clarify much of Laura’s dense dialect, it would take away her progression of comfort as the interview continued, the dynamic between interviewer and interviewee. It speaks to the ethos of the FWP that the Faulks turned the interview into a conversation, that they and the best of their peers wanted their history to be a dialogue. ⁵