student photography offered in a charity silent auction at Dec. 2 event

Get a sneak peek at student photography that will be presented at the December 2 event addressing the experiences of young women and education in an urbanizing America. The photography is part of a silent auction. Proceeds benefit Jemison Mansion and the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society. Some background: students enrolled in "The Nineteenth Century City," a History course at the University of Alabama, were charged with exploring the ways in which young women pursuing an education figured into an urbanizing world. Throughout the semester, they visited several sites in Tuscaloosa to see buildings, among them Gorgas House, the Drish House, Jemison Mansion, the L & N Railroad Station, the Old Tavern, the Alabama Museum of Natural History, the ruins of the the former Alabama State Capitol building and later, a "female" academy, and other places, among them the Black Warrior River. These sites and others permit us to witness how the "nineteenth century city" is still with us as seen in advancements in technology that made it possible for people, raw materials and products to get from Point A to Point B, but also in how an increasingly wealthy country and global market provided ways for some individuals to participate in leisure activities that also reflected rising industry. The arrival of department stores and professionalization of baseball by the late 19th century serve as examples. The photos represent this query. To see the photos in person, visit UA's Gorgas House 4-5:30 pm December 2, 2015. Our guest speaker is Birmingham Southern University Associate Professor of History Victora Ott. Her talk is titled "A Safe Place to Hide?: The Role of Female Academies in the Confederate South." There will also be a poster display unveiling primary sources the students studied as well as a chronological history of local colleges that young women attended, among them Sims Female Academy, Alabama Female Academy, Alabama Female Athenaeum, Tuskaloosa Female College, Alabama Central Female College, Hills Female College and UA, which opened its doors to women in 1893.

still image project

I just attended THATcamp here at the University of Alabama, a two-day marathon of sorts that allowed me to see the possibilities of bringing digital technology into my teaching and research. Being there with others interested in similar possibilities - students, faculty and staff from institutions, educational ones and otherwise, around this state -  helped me think through the aims of one assignment in this course.  Toward the end of this course (and presumably after they have learned much), the students will randomly select a building that existed on or off this campus during the nineteenth century, capture it visually via a photograph and complete a short research paper on it. Their photos and findings will be reformatted into a short movie that presents some of the key ideas in this course. The students will learn about resources at a campus' digital media production center, which will aid our ability to complete this project. We will post it here and may present it publicly on campus. We will be very attentive to what it means to think about space and place "historically" (i.e. we will look for the how's and why's of moments when things and people change). The students will essentially think deeply about how "the nineteenth century city" is still with us. They will hopefully find meaning in why some structures are located in various places in this city. What we learn could be interesting because Tuscaloosa was rarely thought of as a city during the nineteenth century. Even today, some people might call it a "town."  As an aside, this morning a National Public Radio report on the power of still images of "a world at war" affirmed for me the ways in which the act of taking a simple picture can capture much about what is happening around us across time.