After a semester of hard work learning new digital skills and exploring the role of digital archives in the preservation of communications technologies that span the entirety of human history, students in HUM 331 have put together impressive final projects related to digitized sources in Princeton University’s Special Collections. Over the course of the semester, students learned a variety of digital skills that they used to build a digital narrative about a source or set of sources selected from Princeton University’s digital special collections. These sites were built from a template created by Professor Melissa Reynolds housed on the course’s GitHub repository using Jekyll, Markdown, and a bit of customized HTML and CSS. Below are brief descriptions of each project, but you’ll want to click through the links to check them out yourself.

Manifest Destiny

By Sophie Goldman and Hope Perry

This final project compares two journals held in the Firestone Library’s Western Americana Collection. The two journals, written by Nellie Martin Wade and Thomas Adams, capture elements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American ideals about westward expansion. Together, Sophie and Hope brought the voices of Nellie and Thomas to life in a podcast and explored how gender expectations shaped how these two pieces of life writing were conceived by their authors and received by the public.

Princeton Lives and Legacies

By José Pablo Fernandez Garcia and Savannah Pobre

This final project explores the relationship between archives and monuments in the construction of legacy. Drawing together newspaper articles, personal papers, and physical monuments related to five prominent Princeton figures (Arnold Guyot, John Maclean Jr., Woodrow Wilson, Albert Einstein, and Toni Morrison), Savannah and José Pablo used photos and interactive maps to reveal ask whether the cultivation of public legacies on Princeton’s campus is sometimes in tension with archival preservation of individual lives.

Inclusivity at Princeton’s Eating Clubs

By Amna Amin and Paul-Louis Biondi

This final project explores on-going debates surrounding the equity and inclusivity of the Princeton Eating Clubs, important social institutions adjacent to Princeton’s campus that have for decades been the focus of activism at Princeton. Using interactive timelines, maps, and photos of digitized archival materials, Paul-Louis and Amna narrate the history of racial, gender, and socioeconomic discrimination at the Eating Clubs, reflecting on the role of these institutions in the twenty-first century.

Toleration of Jews in England

By Levi Blinder

This final project is a deep dive into a single digitized source in the Sid Lapidus ‘59 Collection on Liberty and the American Revolution. The source, Some Queries Relative to the Jews Occasioned by a Late Sermon, published in 1753 in London, presents a dialogue and debate related to the passage of the 1753 Jewish Naturalization Act. Levi shows through quantitative analysis of publication data that the “Jewish Question” was of interest in the years immediately surrounding the passage of the Act, and through a close reading of the arguments presented in Some Queries, he reveals what was at stake in eighteenth-century England with respect to questions of toleration and anti-semitism.