Month: February 2021

The 1970s to the 1980s was a period of much social change in American history. The rise of social tensions in the 1960s developed over concerning and controversial issues of women’s rights, authority, and human sexuality to name a few. This was identified as the Counterculture of the 1960s. The Second-wave of feminism also began in the 1960s and lasted roughly to the 1980s, significantly impacting gender roles in social practices and expectations. Thus exploration of any shifts in dating culture between the 1970s and the 1980s would highlight the changing norms and values of American society at this time, something the current historical scholarship is lacking.

What would further enhance exploration of dating culture changes during this period would be presenting it as a digital timeline. Change over time has a significant impact on many historical topics, but laying it out in an interactive setting, helps viewers better relate the changes happening to the time they are occurring. Moreover, a visual display of detailed research is often easier to take in as it includes images, links and a creative organization unique to a digital timeline. That being said, I propose using Knight Lab’s TimelineJS. This tool allows me to organize my research along a timeline, demonstrating change over time. I want to explore how dating advice changed from 1970 to 1989. While this is a short period of time, only two decades, I plan on going into detail about the different themes and messages presented to young girls that I see presented in various publications. For example some of my research questions are: Is there a shift from more traditional dating advice to a more feminist perspective? If so, when does that shift happen? Are there any significant shifts in gender roles? Is there more than one shift? Do these shifts occur at the same time or follow one after the other?

My chosen sources would be dating advice literature and various newspaper articles from 1970-1989. I would present books from multiple points in that period, ideally the beginning, middle and end chunks to explore any significant changes in thought, poplar topics and messages. I would explore the rituals and expectations of heterosexual relationships and what these findings suggest about accepted gender roles in dating situations.

After some preliminary research, some dating advice literature I would analyze would be:

• Our Bodies, Ourselves; A Book By and For Women, Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (1973)
• Sex Etiquette : Should I?, Can I?, May I?, Must I? : The Modern Woman’s Guide to Mating Manners, Hamel, Marilyn (1984)
• The Teen Dating Guide, Stewart, Marjabelle Young (1984)
• Charm; The Career Girl’s Guide to Business & Personal Success, Whitcomb, Helen and Rosalind Lang (1971)
• “Men Play the Waiting Game in the Dating Game,” Berman, Laura (1989)

These books and article already give me a wide range of dating culture from the early 1970s, mid 1980s and late 1980s.

I would read through all the dating advice literature and newspaper articles I can find, while keeping track of various themes and changes to advice about specific dos and don’ts in dating. I would input the publication dates of each source into the digital timeline, including a quick summary and image of the source to provide a visual for viewers. After summarizes the general content, I would dive into the specific topics and advice presented in each source, ideally pointing out the same topics discussed in different sources with potentially different advice. I will also link to sources online if they can be found there. Potentially, I would also include links to various online articles about dating during the 1970s and 1980s.

Prior to diving into the primary sources, I would designate the first timeline entry to previous scholarship on the topic to give some background and reason for my focus on literature and newspaper articles. Some secondary sources I would include are:

• From Front Porch to Back Seat : Courtship in Twentieth-Century America, Bailey, Beth L
• Sex in the Heartland, Bailey, Beth L
•  “Sex and the Me Decade: Sex and Dating Advice Literature of the 1970s,” Ward, Anna E
• “Interpersonal Relationships in Women’s Magazines: Dating and Relating in the 1970s and 1980s,” Prusank, Diane T., Robert L. Duran, and Dena A. DeLillo
•  “From Moutain Peak to Total Woman: An Evolutionary History of Pre-Feminist Dating Advice,” King, Andrew

Overall, developing a digital timeline to explore dating culture changes over time creates an interactive, visually stimulating learning environment to the benefit of the topic and learners. A journal article or book doesn’t allow for the reader to click through a timeline that clearly highlights the year with the source that demonstrates the dating norms and expectations in that moment. Moreover, a source visual image is rarely incorporated into writing pieces, but can easily and effectively be included alongside a summary and content analysis of that source in a digital timeline. In another sense, this digital timeline could be a virtual exhibit for a museum or even a presentation for classroom purposes. The possibilities are endless and must be explored.  

Throughout American history, there have been several political phenomena that have become defining characteristics of American politics, such as individualism and sectionalism. Phenomena like these have deep roots in America’s past, going back to the 18th and 19th centuries. In spite of this, however, these concepts are rarely invoked consciously. Conversely, the concept of “states’ rights” is not just a significant political concept in American history, it has been (and continues to be) invoked by politicians and private citizens alike.

“States’ rights” can be traced as far back as the 1790s, when the Jeffersonian and Federalist factions sparred over what they deemed the correct course that the government should take, especially between the issue of a centralized or de-centralized government. That was not the only time when “states’ rights” was a central concept in American politics, and it would only become more relevant as the 19th century unfolded. In the present day, this concept has become increasingly invoked by, and affiliated with, American conservatives. But in the past, the issue was less partisan, and had different connotations from today.

This being the case, I am interested in studying the evolution of “states’ rights” throughout the 19th century, and to utilize digital historical tools and methods to do so. One way that I will do this is by using Google Ngram to identify periods when the term was used more, and to draw correlations between it and other issues of the time. I will also utilize the Library of Congress’ database, so that I may find specific documents relevant to the issue of “states’ rights.” Finally, I will run certain texts and documents that I find on the LOC website through Voyant, so that I may draw further correlations between “states’ rights” and other issues that are paired with it, like tariffs, slavery, taxes, etc. Ultimately, I hope that this project will help me identify certain patterns between the invocation of “states’ rights,” and the occurrence of certain political crises that arose simultaneously with “states’ rights” usage. If this is accomplished, then hopefully it will demonstrate the fluidness by which the concept is invoked, and determine when, and how, it is invoked.

History reenactment has always been an interactive and engaging way for museums and historic sites to educate the visitors. I also notice that over the years there is a growing trend of reenactment video channels on Youtube. For my print project, I’m interested in analyzing the history channels on Youtube, specifically on the channels that use history reenactment as their main vehicle to present history. I plan to look into several Youtube Channels, such as Drunk History and CrowsEyeProductions.

Drunk History is an educational comedy series where a historical event was recounted by a drunk narrator and reenacted in each episode. Drunk History was aired in 2013 and continued for six seasons until 2020. The series recreated some of the most famous nationals historical events including the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment. The series also highlighted some of the lesser-known stories, such as Oney Judge, an African American women enslaved by the Washington family, who became the subject of an intense manhunt after she escaped from the family, or Nellie Bly, an American journalist who exposed the condition of the mental health institution in the 1880s and prompted the asylum reform by faking insanity to enter the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island and record what she saw. The series took on a fresh spin on history storytelling, it used comedy to draw the audience’s attention while recounting a historical event. The historic accuracy of the series remained a point of concern for many history channels on Youtube. The content of Drunk History was also explored and examined by several independent newspapers. There have not been any major disputes on the stories told in the series. However, it is clear that the reenactment element and the character dialogues of the series are only intended to serve as comedy and are not historically accurate. 

Different from Drunk History, The Crows Eye Productions tries to make the historical reenactment as realistic as possible. The channel has a series titled “Getting Dressed in…” where each episode would show how it was like to get dressed in a historic period. The channel started in 2007, has 342K subscribers, and has produced 28 “Getting Dressed in …” videos and many other history reenactment videos. In some videos, there are only music backgrounds, the actors would reenact the scene without any narration. In more recent videos on the channel, more videos show the reenactments being narrated and the audience is given a historical background of the period and places the video is based on and detailed descriptions of the clothing used in the video. The time period range of these videos is very wide, with the earliest time in the 14th century to the 1960s. The Crows Eye Productions channel mainly focuses on fashion and clothing in history, although it also expanded its production to create series such as “Walk with me through time”, featuring videos set in different time periods with the narration of extract from literature in the time period. 

I am very curious to examine how these platforms communicate and engage with their audience using history reenactment? How is the audience’s reaction towards these approaches? How historically accurate are these contents? Could these platforms reach a broader audience compared to traditional history television channels? I have also come across many other similar channels that are involved with history reenactments, such as Townsends, a channel that focused on the 18th Century lifestyle, English Heritage, and WWII History and Reenacting. Depending on the research of these two channels, I am open to including more channels in the project.

After growing up attending potluck dinners at family reunions and helping my mom recreate recipes from the annual church cookbook, the community and personal relationships surrounding food has always a memorable and influential part of my upbringing. When I was in middle school, I remember receiving my first cookbook from my aunt. She had filled the recipe cards with some of her favorite recipes as well as some dishes that her parents and grandparents taught her. On the back of each recipe, she wrote about these family connections to the dishes or brief anecdotes about making the food for various events. She also included several pages of blank cards for me to contribute new recipes.

In addition to my aunt’s gifted cookbook, my family has accumulated several cookbooks over time, ranging from commercially printed volumes full of recipes from professional chefs, to culturally specific recipes, to the annual church cookbook crowdsourced for fundraising purposes. Looking through the volumes, some of the cookbooks contain a fascinating range of anecdotes, cultural histories, and community histories accompanying some of the recipes. Others give sparse, direct language for creating the dishes. Due to variety of approaches for sharing recipes, I began to wonder about the development of cookbooks over time, which led me to the Michigan State University Libraries’ Feeding America Project.

The Feeding America Project, was a digitization project made possible through a 2001 IMLS National Leadership grant. The project researchers carefully selected 75 books out of nearly 7,000 volumes of cookbooks held in the MSU Libraries’ Cookery and Food Collection to represent the history of cookbooks in America. The selected cookbooks cover various themes and include publications from 1798 to 1922. In order to give a broad overview of the cookbooks found in the United States, the digitized collection includes cookbooks published for a variety of audiences and cultural regions (both nationally and internationally). In addition to scanning each page of the selected books, project participants transcribed each of the selected cookbooks by undergraduate teams of typists and proofread. As a result, the full text transcriptions of each of the digitized volumes are easily accessible.

For my print project, I am interested in analyzing the cookbooks found in Michigan State University’s Feeding America online collection. I think it would be interesting to see how the language used in the cookbooks changes over time and/or based on the theme of the cookbooks. Since the cookbooks are tagged by subject, I think it would be particularly interesting to analyze the way that Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine is represented. With the transcription text available for each cookbook, I could input each of the books into Voyant and analyze the texts thought distant reading, similar to Cameron Blevins’ topic modeling of Martha Ballard’s diary.

If this scope of Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine becomes too narrow to draw analysis from the texts, I could incorporate other cookbooks found in the collection to draw additional comparisons. I think it would also be interesting to see if I could analyze differences between the cookbooks representing Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine and the cookbooks representing regions of the United States. Through either method, I am curious to see if the language used in the cookbooks can reveal additional historical context to foodways and food culture in the United States.