Assignments

Historical Scholarship on the Web (Web Review Essay Proposal)

My review will examine the ways in which historical scholarship has been rendered in a digital format. As a particular genre, digital history scholarship provides intriguing, and often controversial, ways of creating scholarly historical narrative and interpretation. Because of the hypertextual nature of the web and consequently the different ways of "reading" or interacting with a website's content, historical scholarship on the web poses many questions and concerns for the way in which historical narrative and argumentation are constructed. To better investigate these questions I will review the following websites:

Gerald R. Butters, Jr, From Homestead to Lynch Mob: Portrayals of Black Masculinity in Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates. Journal for Multimedia History 3 (2000).

Thomas Dublin and Melissa Doak, Miner's Son, Miners' Photographer: The Life and Times of George Harvan. Journal for Multimedia History 3 (2000).

David Staley, Sequential Art and Historical Narrative: A Visual History of Germany. Journal of the Association for History and Computing v. 5, no. 2 (2002).

Duncan Salkeld, Making Sense of Differences: Postmodern History, Philosophy, and Shakespeare's Prostitutes. Cronicon 3 (1999).

William G. Thomas, III. and Edward L. Ayers, The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities.

My hopes for this review include a better understanding of how historical scholarship can be adapted to the web in ways that are beneficial to authors and readers alike.

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