Events on Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

American Religious Ecologies Team Completes Digitization

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:30:00 +0000

American Religious Ecologies seeks to understand how congregations from different religious traditions related to one another by creating new datasets, maps, and visualizations for the history of American religion. After years of photographing, editing, cataloging, and uploading schedules to the American Religious Ecologies website, we are excited to announce that we have uploaded the last of the 1926 religious census schedules. Although our website indicates that we are only 98% complete, we have digitized every schedule from the 1926 Religious Bodies Census housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, over time, many of these schedules have been lost or destroyed. Paper is not a permanent object. It is easily lost, destroyed, and deteriorates over time. The work being done, not just by the Religious Ecologies team, but at RRCHNM as a whole, is essential to ensuring that future generations have access to archival materials. The American Religious Ecologies project is an excellent example of this work and the benefits it can bring to historians’ understanding of various facets of United States history. The completion of the digitization aspect of this project will enable us to focus more on analyzing the data we have gathered, creating maps, and examining various statistics to better understand the distribution of churches and religion in the United States around 1926.

RRCHNM Receives Funding to Create Teaching Guides on the American Revolution

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Funded through the American Historical Association as part of the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program, the teaching guides will support history educators in teaching a more comprehensive and complete history of American independence.

RRCHNM is proud to announce new grant funding to create two teaching guides for teachers on the history of the American Revolution. The guides are funded by a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Mid-Atlantic & US Territories Region, managed by the American Historical Association. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with Library primary sources to better understand the complex relationships to independence experienced by various groups during the revolutionary era particularly the Black Americans and Indigenous Americans fighting for their own independence on both sides of the conflict. The guides provide activities where students engage with primary sources and model historians’ approach of understanding people in the past through the evidence they left behind. They also contain guidance for incorporating these activities into a typical history curriculum.

Report from the Seventh Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History

Tue, 13 May 2025 09:15:00 +0000

From March 19th to March 21st, 2025, the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, DC hosted the Seventh Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History. The conference theme, real-time history, drew on Roy Rosenzweig’s call to action that historians need to directly address the methodological potential and risks of the digital age.

Designed as a forum, the conference prompted attendees to share what opportunities, problems, and concerns arise while “documenting the now.” To allow space for unstructured creativity after long days of conferencing, the GHI team and I also arranged a zine-making workshop in which attendees crafted and exhibited their own mini magazines (just for fun!). As a first-time attendee to the DH conference, I was especially struck by how each presenter chose and justified different methodologies to achieve their project goals. The self-management evident in the still-emerging field reminded me of a Do-It-Yourself ethos usually applied to art and music. Scholars, practitioners, and activists discussed the following topics while sharing their experiences tackling real-time archiving.

Carrying On When the Grants Go Away

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Over the past three decades, RRCHNM has received many awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). We’ve used a truly tiny portion of the federal budget to have a huge impact on individuals and communities. Students in public schools use our teaching resources. Visitors to public history sites learn more from our websites. Citizens wondering about the origin of our nation listen to our podcast about the American Revolution. For literally pennies per person we reach, we’ve had a huge impact on public understandings of the past.

NEH Institute Participants Present at AHA on Higher Education History

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Five participants in the NEH-funded institute, Unpacking the History of Higher Education, presented the projects they developed at the institute at the AHA Annual Meeting in January along with project co-directors, Kelly Schrum and Nate Sleeter. The summer 2024 institute brought together faculty members from higher education programs who teach or support history of higher ed courses.

At the AHA 2025 annual meeting in January, RRCHNM’s Nate Sleeter and Kelly Schrum chaired the panel, “Unpacking the History of Higher Education in the United States.” The panel grew out of an NEH institute of the same name directed by Schrum and Sleeter in the summer of 2024 in which 25 faculty from universities nationwide came together to explore the teaching and research of the history of higher ed through archival sources. Institute participants included faculty, advanced doctoral students, librarians, and archivists who teach or support courses on the history of higher education in Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) programs.

Connect With RRCHNM at AHA25

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 18:00:00 +0000

Many RRCHNM-ers will be featured in sessions coming up this week at the American Historical Associations Annual Meeting. To connect with RRHCNM and learn more about our current projects, here is a list of those sessions.

Saturday, January 4

Digitizing Black History at HBCU’s: A Collaborative Public History Approach

Bowery (Sheraton New York, Lower Level), 8:30am-10am

Chaired by Marion McGee of the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and a panel with Catiana Foster of Tuskeegee University, Timmia King of RRCHNM and George Mason University, Raymond (Garrad) Lee of Jackson State University, Barbara Twyman of Florida A&M University, Shyheim Williams of Clark Atlanta University.

Schedule for the RRCHNM data working group, spring 2023

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000

The RRCHNM data working group meets every other week each semester. The working group exists to aid and abet one another as we seek to create data-driven histories. In our sessions, we share work-in-progress, discuss readings, and teach one another the techniques of the trade. Each semester we create the schedule collaboratively. Here is our schedule for spring semester, 2023.

1 February 2023: Check-in and planning
15 February 2023: Discussion of readings
1 March 2023: Text analysis techniques
29 March 2023: Notebook computing
12 April 2023: Creating and consuming data APIs
26 April 2023: Data visualization challenge

New this semester is our data visualization challenge. Participants in the group will all work on the same dataset (to be determined) and create a data visualization. We will then compare results to see how different people approached the problem. There won’t be a single winner: instead, we will give out yearbook-style superlatives (“most likely to succeed,” “quirkiest,” “most likely to work in finance” and so on).

Basics of Tropy

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Each semester, RRCHNM hosts a series of “Basics Of” sessions that teach the basics of an application, process, or methodology so our graduate students, affiliates, and faculty can get together and learn about that topic. These sessions are hosted by RRCHNM members who are resident experts on the selected topic.

This semester, our first session will be “Basics of Tropy” with Postdoctoral Research Fellow Douglas McRae. Read on to learn more about this session happening on Tuesday, January 31, 2023, from 1-2pm EST.

Jessica Mack @ CLAH 2021

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 10:13:08 +0000

Dr. Jessica Mack, a postdoctoral fellow at RRCHNM, will chair and present in a panel titled “Building Modernization: Urban Megaprojects in 20th Century Latin America” at the Conference on Latin American History’s 2021 annual meeting. Dr. Mack will present her work titled “Building the Lettered City: Planning and Construction in Ciudad Universitaria, 1950-54.” You can watch the panel online on Sunday, January 10, at 4:30 p.m.