2020 Student Digital History Roundup

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Last year, we featured a collection of digital history projects by students across the 2018-2019 academic year. The 2019-2020 projects, many of which were produced in difficult and unexpected conditions, are just as fascinating and varied as last year’s. We hope you find them interesting and inspiring. And make sure to read Jonathan Burdick’s piece on the challenges of suddenly having to teach his high school Digital History class in a completely digital space as well.


Politics of Protest and Gender: The Cleveland Latin American Mission Team in Context

Curated by Fall 2019 “Introduction to Historical Studies” students at Cleveland State University and edited by the instructor, Dr. Shelley Rose.

This exhibit . . . demonstrates the powerful potential of historical thinking skills to tell a local story with national and transnational resonance. Further, this exhibit contextualizes the Cleveland Latin American Mission Team’s history, the murder of the four churchwomen, Cold War policy, and activism on Cleveland’s religious left.


Rhode Island Suffrage Timeline

In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the federal constitution, which granted women the right to vote, students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, in collaboration with the Lippitt House Museum, constructed this timeline. It brings to life the Rhode Island suffrage story from the 1663 King Charles Charter to Governor Lincoln Chafee’s 2011 voter ID law, a 350-year timespan longer than the history of the United States.


Isle St-Jean: The Expulsion of 1758

Created by students in Daniel Samson’s Spring 2020 “State and Society in Colonial Canada” course at Brock University.

This site endeavours to explore further the 1758 deportation, with a focus on the island of Isle St. Jean. At its basic form, this project is a digital map containing information related to the people of Isle St. Jean who experienced periods of both prosperity and hardship. By including geographic information and historical data, it allows us to visualize this story through both time and space, hence creating a story-map.


Laboring Over History

This site was Meghan Jones‘ senior thesis at Northeastern.

In this exhibit we take a close look at the ways that women have fought together to achieve equality in the workplace, focusing on Boston, but not without other monumental strikes and events.


Experiential Environments

A.L. McMichael’s Spring 2020 “Byzantine Landscape and Environment” course at Michigan State produced this capstone project.

In Byzantine history, embodied knowledge is the result of experiencing the past through multiple senses for experiential learning, rather than simply relying on historical texts. In this project, students visualized historical places in 3D in order to better understand Byzantium through first-hand exploration of historical sources


The Making of Uncharted: American Expeditions

The students in Abby Mullen’s Spring 2020 “Topics in Digital History: American Explorers” course at George Mason University produced 8 podcast episodes that “[tell] the stories of Americans who explored the world around them.”


Contingent Magazine believes that history is for everyone, that every way of doing history is worthwhile, and that historians deserve to be paid for their work. Our writers are adjuncts, grad students, K-12 teachers, public historians, and historians working outside of traditional educational and cultural spaces. They are all paid.

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