scholarly journals Narrative of the Krueger-Scott Mansion Project: Constructing Newark History

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Katie Singer

<p><em>Newark, New Jersey’s once proposed Krueger-Scott African-American Cultural Center (KSAACC) tells a story of history, economy, race, built environment, and much more. The Center’s development mirrors other urban stories with regard to race, preservation, urban failure, and memory, while also offering a unique understanding of Newark’s own history. The story of the 1990s Krueger-Scott project adds chapters to urban study as a whole, and to the study of Black cultural sites around the country.</em></p><p><em>The KSAACC was met with and has continued to receive resistance from some of Newark’s citizens as well as local journalists and ultimately the very politicians who had at first supported the idea. The ongoing financing of what seemed to some a less than urgent project in a city that had so many pressing needs at the time became a source of tension and ultimately splintered the community. </em></p><p><em>Matters such as these speak to some larger questions concerning the value and place of public history, oral history, and historic preservation in urban environments.  This paper is about the creation of African-American historical knowledge and the ways America sees fit to make it public knowledge. </em></p>

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-35
Author(s):  
Ywone Edwards-Ingram

Before the living history museum of Colonial Williamsburg started its concerted interpretation of slavery in 1979, the African American coachmen were already representing the past and implicating black history and slavery in this restored eighteenth-century capital of Virginia. Various records of photographs, postcards, letters, newspaper clippings, oral history accounts, visitor observations, and corporate papers provide a window to understand the social climates of the museum’s period in the 1930s to the 1970s. This body of evidence supports the contention that the coachmen were visible and influenced public history within and outside the museum.


2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.


10.2196/15801 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. e15801 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terika McCall ◽  
Todd A Schwartz ◽  
Saif Khairat

Background The rates of mental illness among African American women are comparable with the general population; however, they significantly underutilize mental health services compared with their white counterparts. Previous studies revealed that interventions delivered via text messaging are effective and can be used to increase access to services and resources. More insight into whether or not this modality is acceptable for use to deliver mental health care to help African American women manage anxiety and depression is needed. Objective This exploratory study aimed to gain insight into the acceptability of using text messaging to help African American women manage anxiety and depression. Methods A self-administered Web-based survey was launched in June 2018 and closed in August 2018. Eligible participants were African American women (18 years or older) who reside in the United States. Participants were recruited through convenience sampling (eg, email sent via listservs and social media posts). Respondents were provided an anonymous link to the questionnaire. The survey consisted of 53 questions on the following subjects: sociodemographic characteristics, attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help, mobile phone use, and acceptability of using a mobile phone to receive mental health care. Results The results of this exploratory study (N=101) showed that fewer than half of respondents endorsed the use of text messaging to communicate with a professional to receive help to manage anxiety (49/101, 48.5%) and depression (43/101, 42.6%). Approximately 51.4% (52/101) agreed that having the option to use text messaging to communicate with a professional if they are dealing with anxiety would be helpful. Similarly, 48.5% (49/101) agreed that having the option to use text messaging to communicate with a professional if they are dealing with depression would be helpful. Among participants who agreed that text messaging would be helpful, more than 80% noted being comfortable with its use to receive help for managing anxiety (approximately 86%, 45/52) and depression (approximately 82%, 40/49; highly significant positive association, all P<.001). More than 50% of respondents (56/101, 55.4%) indicated having concerns about using text messaging. No statistically significant associations were found between age and agreement with the use of text messaging to communicate with a professional to receive help for managing anxiety (P=.26) or depression (P=.27). Conclusions The use of text messaging was not highly endorsed by African American women as an acceptable mode of communication with a professional to help them manage anxiety or depression. Concerns around privacy, confidentiality, and the impersonal feel of communicating about sensitive issues via text messages must be addressed for this modality to be a viable option. The findings of this study demonstrated the need for further research into the use of mobile technology to provide this population with more accessible and convenient options for mental health care.


Author(s):  
Ian Rocksborough-Smith

A 1942 banquet honored Chicago’s public school superintendent William Johnson for his attention to a proposed reform of local social studies curricula concerning African American history. On this occasion, Johnson met with South Side schoolteacher Madeline Morgan, an advocate of local black public history. Morgan had devised these curriculum reforms as units for grades 1 through 8. Morgan (later Stratton Morris) taught at Emerson Primary School. In the nearly two years prior to the banquet and at the behest of the district, Morgan and a small team of colleagues had devised history units that would underscore the crucial role African Americans played in the nation’s history from slavery through emancipation and into the twentieth century. From the perspective of those who honored Johnson, his presence at the banquet was more than just a trivial photo opportunity. The banquet was attended by more than three hundred people and sponsored by local middle-class black women’s clubs and civic organizations. Beyond the adulation afforded Johnson, the banquet also recognized the labors of public schoolteachers like Morgan and those of other African American public-history activists and educators who through the 1940s and 1950s sought to revise local curricula to include significant modules on black American history....


2011 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilda Kean

This issue of Public History Review discusses aspects of the distinctive role of public historians that goes beyond an approach simply aimed at bringing in people to exhibitions or making historical knowledge ‘accessible’. As James Gardner argued in the last issue of Public History Review, ‘We are often our own worst enemy, failing to share what we do. If we want the public to value what we do, we need to share the process of history’. Opening up the premises underpinning different forms of historical representation can assist in widening the historical process and facilitate a way of understanding and making meaning.


Genealogy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Ellen Fernandez-Sacco

The only slave narrative from Puerto Rico is included in Luis Diaz Soler’s Historia de la esclavitud negra en Puerto Rico (1953; 2002). This article considers this embedded account as part of the literature of slave narratives to address a gap in the literature; this is perhaps due to the account’s singularity and brevity. Beyond this, the other source for understanding the experience of enslaved women in Puerto Rico is through legal and parish documents, generated by a colonial government and church supportive of slavery. As a result, lives under enslavement are quantified statistically, and the lack of oral history or personal accounts hampers understanding of the effects of enslavement from an individual perspective. Documenting such a life comes with its own set of issues, as shown here by demonstrating the limits of various archival resources. There is no one methodology to follow to reconstruct lives and family histories under slavery, an institution designed to prevent the formation of a historical sense of self and agency. Factoring in familial connections makes my own location as a researcher visible, as knowledge is not neutral. Despite its brevity, considering Leoncia Lasalle’s account, and that of her daughter, Juana Rodriguez Lasalle, in terms of its multiple contexts—microhistory, similarities with U.S. and Cuban slave narratives, family histories, and the archive—reveals the constructed nature of the idea of historical knowledge, which also has implications for genealogical practice involved with slavery and life post-emancipation.


Author(s):  
Venkat Srinivasan ◽  
TB Dinesh ◽  
Bhanu Prakash ◽  
A Shalini

Over the past decade, there have been many efforts to streamline the accessibility of archival material on the web. This includes easy display of oral history interviews and archival records, and making their content more amenable to searches. Science archives wrestle with new challenges, of not just putting out the data, but of building spaces where historians, journalists, the scientific community and the general public can see stories emerging from the linking of seemingly disparate records. We offer a design architecture for an online public history exhibit that takes material from existing archives. Such a digital exhibit allows us to explore the middle space between raw archival data and a finished piece of work (like a book or documentary). The National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) digital exhibit is built around thirteen ways to reflect upon and assemble the history of the institution, which is based in Bangalore, India. (A nod to Wallace Stevens' poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”). The exhibit tries to bring to light multiple interpretations of NCBS, weaved by the voices of over 70 story tellers. The material for the exhibit is curated from records collected to build the Centre's archive. The oral history excerpts, along with over 600 photographs, official records, letters, and the occasional lab note, give a glimpse into the Centre's multifaceted history and show connections with the present.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (7) ◽  
pp. 1018-1025 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabrielle Whitmore ◽  
Amin Ramzan ◽  
Jeanelle Sheeder ◽  
Saketh R Guntupalli

ObjectiveThere has been an increase in the use of neoadjuvant chemotherapy in recent years. Our objective was to determine if African American women are more likely to receive neoadjuvant chemotherapy than primary debulking surgery, when compared to their Caucasian counterparts, and the impact of such an approach on oncologic outcomes.MethodsA retrospective cohort study was performed using the National Cancer Database (NCDB). Women aged 18–90 years, diagnosed with stage IIIC or IV epithelial ovarian cancer between January 2010 through December 2014 were included. Women with unknown treatment or treatments outside of neoadjuvant chemotherapy or primary debulking surgery were excluded. Only women of Caucasian, African American, or Hispanic origin who received either neoadjuvant chemotherapy or primary debulking surgery were included; all other races were excluded. Descriptive statistics were computed, and continuous variables were assessed for normality. Groups were compared using ANOVA or non-parametric medians tests for continuous variables, and chi-squared tests were used for dichotomous or categorical variables. Logistic regression was used to identify predictors of treatment. A p value of 0.05 was considered statistically significant.ResultsA total of 19 838 women with stage IIIC and IV epithelial ovarian cancer met the inclusion criteria. A total of 14 988 (75.6%) were treated with primary debulking surgery, while 4850 women (24.4%) were treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Of those treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy, 24.5% were white, 27.0% were African American, and 22.1% were Hispanic (p=0.005), and when adjusted for confounders, being African American was a predictor of receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy (adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 1.29, 95% CI 1.10 to 1.51). Ninety-day mortality rates were higher in African American women compared with Caucasian and Hispanic women (2.9% vs 2.0% vs 1.6%, p=0.013). There were no differences in 30-day mortality, 90-day mortality, or status at last contact in African American women, when comparing neoadjuvant chemotherapy and primary debulking surgery. In Caucasian women, outcomes were worse in women receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy.ConclusionsCompared to other races, African American women with advanced ovarian cancer are more likely to receive neoadjuvant chemotherapy than primary debulking surgery and had a higher 90-day mortality rate. In African American women there was no difference in outcomes based on treatment type.


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