The historical question that I focused on was \u201cWhy were ghost stories common across America in the 1930s? What does this say about the time period?\u201d. Ghost stories were common across America in the 1930s because it was a way to bring communities closer together. Having a common topic, one everyone in the town knew about, that was a distraction from their current economic crisis would\u2019ve been a relief to a lot of people. I\u2019m sure many were scared, but as we\u2019ve seen from how popular ghost stories are, people enjoy that kind of fear. Especially how not everyone who told a ghost story believed in it, many were skeptics. But it\u2019s more about how ghost stories and scaring each other is a form of bonding, one that many communities take part in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I got all of my sources from the Library of Congress Federal Writers Project interviews which meant that I only had what people talked about. We didn\u2019t mention ghost stories at all in class because there isn\u2019t much on it from the 1930s, but I\u2019ve always been interested in ghost stories and I thought it would be a unique idea for my final project<\/a>. I\u2019d already had a corpus from our project on Voyant to go off of, but I decided to create a new list of ghost stories so I could gain insight into ghost stories from around America rather than random ones that I had chosen a month ago. I wanted to see if there were regional differences in the stories, and I had decided that along with Voyant, my project was going to have a map. I wasn\u2019t really aware of how helpful maps can be to enhance a project until we read the introduction to Discovering the South: One Man’s Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s<\/em> and had the accompanying website that marked Jonathan Daniels\u2019 travels <\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. The map allowed me to go on the journey with Daniels as he worked to document his travels and the general feelings of southerners at the time. The map gave me visuals and a brief description of where he was and why it\u2019s important that he stopped there. A few weeks after going through Daniels\u2019 journey, we created our projects on mapping, and with it read an article about how digital mapping has evolved to allow digital historians and professors to be able to teach in a more tangible way <\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. These mapping projects give a real insight into what it was like to live as a black person immediately after emancipation or be able to understand how many lynchings happened in the South between 1877 and 1950. Seeing racism plainly shown, with data to back it up, can be very impactful, especially for students who don\u2019t have much experience in learning about racism. I also included an image analysis in my project because I felt like the picture I found perfectly encapsulating what I meant when I talk about people enjoying being scared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This class has really helped me understand the digital world and the 1930s in ways I hadn\u2019t before. Many of the websites and ideas we learned were completely new to me but were still relatively simple to understand. I enjoyed when we had to go to a New Deal site near us, because not only did it give me an excuse to explore DC, but it also put the New Deal into a realistic context so that we could see that the effects are still around us in many ways. I had no idea how many parks and structures across the country came from the 1930s, and how much we use them in our everyday lives. The lessons we had on copyrights and data usage have been eye-opening into how complicated and restrictive they are <\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. I was also fascinated by our conversation about how memes are completely changing how we interact, and how information gets spread <\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. Both relevant and important topics today, and connecting them to the 1930s only enhanced the topic more in my mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before this class, I didn\u2019t know much about the 1930s, only that it was when the Great Depression happened and FDR was elected. I had no idea the New Deal included so much art, writing, and theater and wasn\u2019t just infrastructure and economics. Being able to directly connect consequences from the 1930s to today\u2019s world is a valuable skill and I\u2019m glad this class was able to offer me the chance to do just that. The historical question that I focused on was \u201cWhy were ghost stories common across America in the 1930s? What does this say about the time period?\u201d. Ghost stories were common across America in the 1930s because it was a way to bring communities closer together. Having a common topic, one everyone in the town knew … Continue reading “Scared Since the 30s”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-final"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2625"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2673,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2625\/revisions\/2673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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