[July 19-20 marks the 175th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. Although, as I argued in this weeklong series, our focus on Seneca Falls has overshadowed other important early conventions, it’s still a milestone moment, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts. Leading up to a weekend post on our 21st century movement!]
On three
of the many interesting things you can find on the Women’s Rights National Historical
Park’s website.
1)
The Pictures: One of my favorite things about National
Historical Park websites is the way they consistently use photo
galleries to capture the kinds of artifacts and elements that might
otherwise only be accessible to in-person visitors to the sites. Of the many
such photos on that page, my favorites are those
which present different angles and views of the statues in the Visitor
Center lobby exhibit The First Wave,
including for example this
evocative close-up of the Frederick Douglass statue in that group. I’ve long
argued that raising more statues to inclusive and inspiring historical
figures is a key way to challenge our long history of problematic statues, and
since I haven’t yet had a chance to get to Seneca Falls, I loved seeing some of
these statues through the website’s galleries.
2)
The Research: Historic sites aren’t just
representations of the past, of course; they are also repositories of the kinds
of documents and evidence through which such representations have to be
constructed. That evidence might seem like something that really requires an
in-person visit to encounter, but the Seneca Falls site offers an alternative:
the Research
page, where they present hyperlinked versions of a number of the documents
(both historical and scholarly/analytical) out of which they’ve developed their
exhibits and interpretations. You could spend a whole day reading through all
those pieces, and I know I’m a deeply nerdy AmericanStudier but that sounds
like a pretty darn good day to me.
3)
The Map: Those first two are things at the
historic site that can also be included on the website; but there are also
things that websites can do and offer more easily than an in-person site. One
of my favorites on the Seneca Falls National Historical Park’s website is this
resource, located under the History & Culture: Stories tab. Many
scholars, among them my
Dad, are finding new and impressive ways to use digital maps to convey information
about history, literature, and more; “The Erie Canal and the Network to Freedom”
is a wonderful example of that trend, and something that really utilizes the
digital humanities potentials of a historic site’s site.
Contemporary
connections this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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