history lessons
Fulfill your dream of reading someone else’s homework.
I applied to grad school on the kind of whim that occurs only to a new parent emboldened by the mental clarity of that first post-baby sleep cycle. I needed this. Not to advance my career, which is about something totally different, but to remember what it felt like to use my brain.
Little did I know there was another (foster) sibling on the way—and a global pandemic. I took most of my classes on Zoom, a baby on my hip and a toddler bouncing off the walls behind me.
Five years later, I’m still ‘working on’ my thesis—and I still love my research subject. When it’s complete, I will have the first chapter of a graphic history weaving together the oral histories of Hanford Nuclear Plant downwinders. Someday, I hope, I will find the brain space to finish the book. For now, please enjoy the little pieces of digital history I created for classes along the way.
Condemned Women: Confessions of Women Awaiting Execution in Early Modern London
This podcast—feat. voice acting by every adult member of my pandemic quarantine pod—brings to life my British History research paper on the women criminals who spilled their life stories to prison chaplains in the days before their execution.
A Tale of Two Courses
This blog contains posts from a Digital Humanities course—including contributions to the San Juan Island, Washington Island Histories project—and my self-designed Graphic Histories independent study course.
Bringing data to life
As Spider-Man — or was it Gandhi? — once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Equally accurate: with great meme skills come great responsibility. With increasingly-accessible digital data visualization tools, even a technically accurate map, graph, or infographic representing incomplete or manipulated data can appear trustworthy.
Out of the Archives: An Oral History on Wartime, Civil Rights, and the Great Migration in Early 20th Century Seattle
Ernest A White (1894-1979), was the first Black person to go to Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane. After his discharge from the Army, he moved to Seattle where he built a home and worked 39 years for the U.S. Postal Service.
In this interview, Ernest discusses life during the First World War, the Great Depression, World War II, discrimination in housing and employment, the Great Migration of the 1940s in Seattle, and how the city changed after the second world war.
You can find White’s full interview with transcript, photos, and additional documents related to his life, at digitalarchives.wa.gov.
Washington State Archives internship
As an intern for the Washington State Archives, I wrote a abstracts for oral history interviews that were to be added to the digital archive. Combing through these interviews, many of which contain 100+ pages of memories, inspired my thesis project of creating a graphic history of Hanford Nuclear Site based on the interviews conducted by the Hanford Health Information Network (HHIN). The archives are not a fast-moving machine, so many of my abstracts still haven’t made it onto the digital archive. Here are a few that have.
Hanford Health Information Archives (HHIA)
Oral History Collection, 1996-2000
This collection contains transcripts of oral history interviews conducted from 1996 through 2000 by the Hanford Health Information Network (HHIN).
Bicentennial Oral History Black Project
As part of the United States' Bicentennial celebration, the Washington State Archives undertook an oral history project which focused on the Black community in Seattle and King County.
Arline “J” Stewart Yarbough (Treasures of the Archives)