One of the most complicated websites RRCHNM has been sustaining in recent years is the Papers of the War Department (PWD), a crowdsourced transcription project to recover and make accessible the once-lost papers of the War Department whose offices burned to the ground in 1800. The project began with document collection and digitization efforts in the 1990s, but only became a website and an RRCHNM project two decades ago, in 2006.

RRCHNM has been in the business of producing digital history for over thirty years now, and because of this we have developed hundreds of projects on a variety of now-old web software and systems. Five years ago, when I joined RRCHNM, we decided to shift and consolidate our tech stack towards tools and software that would allow us a bit more creativity in the projects we were developing as well as provide easier ways to sustain projects over time. That resulted in a shift in our technical expertise, leading us to prefer the Python-based web framework Django or the static site generator Hugo for projects while reaching for WordPress, Drupal, and Omeka would be used sparingly.

My job is worldbuilding. Well, that’s not quite accurate. My job is recovering the world as it was in the age of sail.

For the past year my job at RRCHNM has been to write my own game, “Learning the Ropes”, using a free, open-source program called Twine. The platform allows users to write create-your-own-adventure-style text-based games using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Before pitching my own game, I spent a year revising another Twine game: “Gaming the Great Plague”. These are a part of the RRCHNM Games project.

Download the Zine

If you’re at all familiar with the fiercely independent, anti-institutional history of the zine, you might reject the supposition that they can be used within academic circles. Yet zines have potential as a creative, cohesive outlet for public history.

Zines originated around the 1930s in science fiction circles but are most often associated with the latter half of the twentieth century. Used as an alternative art form outside of mainstream media, zine authors from the 1960s through the 1990s used self-publishing to broadcast bold ideas through small, often collaborative, pamphlets. Zine topics could range from birth control to bus routes, but almost always were intended to communicate something significant from the creator to the outside world. For a brief history of zines, visit the Rare Book Collection at UNC Libraries.

Originally published at https://www.deepthimurali.com/art-history-and-data/south-asia-at-the-met

Museum metadata is messy metadata (and sometimes, also, just messy in non-computational ways.) But museum metadata is also historical archive that scholars and the public alike ignore.

Every object in a museum collection arrives with a story attached — a donor’s name, a date, a department assignment, a classification. Individually, these are administrative details: the bureaucratic residue of how an object got from somewhere else to a vitrine, a storage shelf, or a database entry. But at scale, across thousands of objects and more than a century of acquisitions, these details become historical data. They become a record of how an institution decided what South Asia was, who got to decide that, and when those decisions were made.

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University are pleased to announce that Mills Kelly has been named the new executive director of RRCHNM. This year RRCHNM is celebrating its twenty-fifth year, and Kelly has been a part of the Center for eighteen of those years. He joined the department and CHNM in 2001 to work with Roy Rosenzweig, the founder of CHNM.

Clyde Miller hated what he was hearing. It was June 1918, and the U.S. had been at war for a little over a year, and the man on the platform in the park in Canton, Ohio was speaking — passionately, mockingly — about the many ways that the war had undermined the rights of American citizens. Socialists had been sent to jail for criticizing the war, complained Eugene Debs, the most famous Socialist in America: “It is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world.” There was knowing laughter from the crowd of picnicking socialists.

Congratulations to Envisioning Seneca Village on being selected as the 2025 winner of the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History!

Envisioning Seneca Village is a project depicting what this significant nineteenth-century village might have looked like in the spring of 1855, about two years before it was destroyed by the City of New York to build Central Park. It features an interactive 3D model, a non-interactive tour through the 3D model (A Tour through the Visualization), a printable PDF guide with maps (A Map-based Tour), and supplementary materials. The project is anchored in extensive scholarship and aims to make the village’s history visible to a wide audience.

I first learned of Seneca Village in 2020. That summer, people tired of having to explain why Black Lives Matter and with an online audience freshly enraged at racism turned to history to popularize further examples of how Black people in the United States had been systematically dispossessed and disempowered by the forces of White power. At the time I was researching Black park use in Kansas City, Missouri where Troost Boulevard, and later Highway 71, were used to displace Black “slums,” leaving lasting economic and health disparities.¹ I was finding, like other historians before me, that “although not created as a racial barrier, the parks and boulevards system served as one.”² The news of a Black village buried under what is now Central Park was not surprising. The renewed popular interest in Seneca Village prompted the Central Park Conservancy to install several historical markers at the site.³ They formed a large outdoor exhibit near the existing New York Parks & Recreation marker.⁴ What I did not know at the time was that this was not the first time Seneca Village became popular.

American Religious Ecologies seeks to understand how congregations from different religious traditions related to one another by creating new datasets, maps, and visualizations for the history of American religion. After years of photographing, editing, cataloging, and uploading schedules to the American Religious Ecologies website, we are excited to announce that we have uploaded the last of the 1926 religious census schedules. Although our website indicates that we are only 98% complete, we have digitized every schedule from the 1926 Religious Bodies Census housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, over time, many of these schedules have been lost or destroyed. Paper is not a permanent object. It is easily lost, destroyed, and deteriorates over time. The work being done, not just by the Religious Ecologies team, but at RRCHNM as a whole, is essential to ensuring that future generations have access to archival materials. The American Religious Ecologies project is an excellent example of this work and the benefits it can bring to historians’ understanding of various facets of United States history. The completion of the digitization aspect of this project will enable us to focus more on analyzing the data we have gathered, creating maps, and examining various statistics to better understand the distribution of churches and religion in the United States around 1926.

This past summer I had the opportunity to work on RRCHNM’s sustainability team. Our work focused on flattening websites built with content management systems (CMS), such as Drupal, Omeka, and WordPress. Flattening refers to the process of simplifying dynamic, database-backed websites to static versions built with only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This minimizes server space and reduces security risks. However, flattening comes with trade-offs, such as losing dynamic features like a search function. One of my main roles this summer was creating a static site search for these flattened websites.

Funded through the American Historical Association as part of the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program, the teaching guides will support history educators in teaching a more comprehensive and complete history of American independence.

RRCHNM is proud to announce new grant funding to create two teaching guides for teachers on the history of the American Revolution. The guides are funded by a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Mid-Atlantic & US Territories Region, managed by the American Historical Association. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with Library primary sources to better understand the complex relationships to independence experienced by various groups during the revolutionary era particularly the Black Americans and Indigenous Americans fighting for their own independence on both sides of the conflict. The guides provide activities where students engage with primary sources and model historians’ approach of understanding people in the past through the evidence they left behind. They also contain guidance for incorporating these activities into a typical history curriculum.

From March 19th to March 21st, 2025, the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, DC hosted the Seventh Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History. The conference theme, real-time history, drew on Roy Rosenzweig’s call to action that historians need to directly address the methodological potential and risks of the digital age.

Designed as a forum, the conference prompted attendees to share what opportunities, problems, and concerns arise while “documenting the now.” To allow space for unstructured creativity after long days of conferencing, the GHI team and I also arranged a zine-making workshop in which attendees crafted and exhibited their own mini magazines (just for fun!). As a first-time attendee to the DH conference, I was especially struck by how each presenter chose and justified different methodologies to achieve their project goals. The self-management evident in the still-emerging field reminded me of a Do-It-Yourself ethos usually applied to art and music. Scholars, practitioners, and activists discussed the following topics while sharing their experiences tackling real-time archiving.

Over the past three decades, RRCHNM has received many awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). We’ve used a truly tiny portion of the federal budget to have a huge impact on individuals and communities. Students in public schools use our teaching resources. Visitors to public history sites learn more from our websites. Citizens wondering about the origin of our nation listen to our podcast about the American Revolution. For literally pennies per person we reach, we’ve had a huge impact on public understandings of the past.

Since RRCHNM’s founding in the 1990s, we have been committed to highlighting the contributions women made in the past. One of our first projects was a CD-ROM version of the textbook Who Built America? which grew out of efforts to reinterpret American history from “the bottom up”—drawing on studies of workers, women, consumers, farmers, African Americans, and immigrants—that has helped transform our understanding of the past. This textbook highlighted perspectives often neglected in traditional teachings of American history, including women’s history.

When Chat GPT first appeared in November 2022, the almost universal reaction in the humanities community could be summed up in one word – Yikes! Almost without warning this new tool seemed ready to make it incredibly easy for students to “write” essays using prompts that took no more than a minute to produce and then, if they were crafty, another 30 minutes to modify a bit so that it wasn’t quite so obvious that the essay had been written by a large language model (LLM).

Just a couple miles from RRCHNM is the campus of Woodson High School, part of the Fairfax County Public School system. Until this past year the school was named for W. T. Woodson, the long time superintendent of FCPS and an opponent of school desegregation. Now the school is named after Carter G. Woodson. Born in 1875, Woodson was the second Black man to receive a PhD from Harvard University. Excluded from the American Historical Association and other professional historical circles, Woodson was a creator of institutions to understand and study Black history. Among the many institutions he founded was Negro History Week, founded nearly a century ago in 1926. Woodson’s observance was the precursor to Black History Month, first observed in 1970 and then federally recognized in 1976 for the bicentennial.

At the start of January, I had the privilege of attending the American Historical Association and presenting a poster for the Religious Ecologies project. While it was fun to put the poster together and answer the questions from people who came up during the poster session, my favorite part, the most valuable part, was the time spent outside the sessions.

As a fifth year PhD candidate in the History Department, I have combined my desire to learn everything I can about female preachers in the early American republic with my enthusiasm for any and all data visualizations and digital humanities tools. Committed to these women, just as they committed themselves to their itinerant ministries, I have expanded my research to include more women, especially Black female preachers, and those from England and Canada who came to the States, and vice-versa. My analysis in my dissertation—a traditional history dissertation—intersects an interest in gender, race, and body studies with a religious history methodology. My focus remains on the women who preached, despite opposition from their families, husbands, pastors, and many others. I center the women, and I still emphasize their relationships with others who supported them.

Five participants in the NEH-funded institute, Unpacking the History of Higher Education, presented the projects they developed at the institute at the AHA Annual Meeting in January along with project co-directors, Kelly Schrum and Nate Sleeter. The summer 2024 institute brought together faculty members from higher education programs who teach or support history of higher ed courses.

At the AHA 2025 annual meeting in January, RRCHNM’s Nate Sleeter and Kelly Schrum chaired the panel, “Unpacking the History of Higher Education in the United States.” The panel grew out of an NEH institute of the same name directed by Schrum and Sleeter in the summer of 2024 in which 25 faculty from universities nationwide came together to explore the teaching and research of the history of higher ed through archival sources. Institute participants included faculty, advanced doctoral students, librarians, and archivists who teach or support courses on the history of higher education in Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) programs.