Contemporary (Post-WWII)

Voices of Civil Rights is a website sponsored by AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), and the Library of Congress to collect and archive first-hand accounts of civil rights developments in the United States with a focus on the second half of the twentieth century. The site includes more than 500 primary accounts dealing with efforts to end discrimination based on race, gender, age, and disability. The site also includes supplemental resources such as images, timelines, music videos, links, and essays on continuing efforts to achieve a more equal society.

The primary function of the site is to collect letters and historical materials from people who witnessed the civil rights movement first-hand. A user can read the accounts of others or submit a letter of their own. The submission process requires two steps. First, a writer must type their story and define certain descriptors such as year, subject, and state. Then the writer must agree to the site’s terms and conditions and provide their name, email, phone number, and contact information. The site reserves the right to edit, reproduce, and distribute submitted stories and images. Most of the letters range from 200-500 words.

For users hoping to read the stories, the accounts are searchable by state, topic, and year, or a user can search by keywords. Each resulting entry provides a title, the author’s name, and a two-line excerpt. A user can also browse the letters without searching, but this is a slow process because the site will only display ten entries at a time. In addition to the letters, the site offers a timeline, images, a feature on Jackie Robinson, and a quiz to test your knowledge. The site incorporates several different mediums in its presentation as well. Besides the letters which can be read, slideshows and music videos offer a visual element and a few interviews provide audio files along with their transcripts.

Beyond the historical materials, Voices of Civil Rights also includes much information about the continuing civil rights movement. In 2004, the site sponsored a bus tour, entitled “Across America,” that visited cities across the American South and South West commemorating civil rights advances, gathering stories, and assessing current knowledge and attitudes about civil rights. The tour is documented with videos of various stops, journal entries by tour writers, and photos. The site also offers several bios of new leaders who have recently founded or joined civil rights initiatives and essays about what the past has to teach the present, new challenges that must be faced, and the protests that can be heard in contemporary culture.

Voices of Civil Rights contributes to the civil rights discussion by stretching our understanding of what “civil rights” include. Among the many stories of freedom marches, voter registration drives, and sit-ins are other stories about discrimination against Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. There are also stories about the push to recognize and fight age discrimination and the experiences of people with disabilities, from physical handicaps to special education needs. These histories are sometimes overshadowed by the celebration of victories over Jim Crow in the South, but other issues certainly deserve the attention they receive here, and the collection of personal accounts in these civil rights battles should help raise the level of their study and discussion.

Miles Travis
George Mason University
May 6, 2005

Folklore.org is an online history collecting site that allows users to view stories, rate and add comments to these stories, and create stories of their own. The site serves as both an archive of popular histories and a facilitator of new collecting projects.

Currently, the only project hosted by the Folklore.com site is a collection of stories about the original Macintosh development team. This project served to launch the site and attract users, so most of the stories are written by Andy Hertzfeld, who is also the author and designer of the site. Hertzfield chose the Macintosh history as a starting point because he says, it was “the most important event that I played a part in.” Although the site has not yet benefited from a large group of contributors, there is a significant body of information contained in more than a hundred entries ranging from 200 to more than 1500 words. The stories are searchable, and cross referenced in categories such as “software design,” “bugs,” “personality clashes,” and “marketing.” The stories are well written, and in some cases, the comments add richly to the original content.

The Folklore.org site is not limited to Macintosh or computing history. New projects will eventually be added as the site expands. Users can propose projects for which they would like to act as editor, and if accepted, the Folklore.com administrators will help set the project. Users can also add their own stories to any current project by creating an account and obtaining a username. This process is quick and simple, requiring no additional information besides a name and email address. Once logged into an account, the user can create stories using an automated form; however, the site administrators retain a large amount of editorial control by approving or rejecting stories before they are published on the site. Comments posted to existing stories also undergo an approval process, although a user does not need an account name to post comments or submit ratings. Additionally, the site maintains a RSS feed so that users can be notified of new postings and updates.

Although the Folklore.com site is helpful for its stories alone, it also promises to contribute to the online collecting effort through the software Andy Hertzfeld developed to run the site. The software is a set of CGI scripts written in Python, and after it is stabilized sufficiently, Hertzfield plans to release it as an open-source download that other online collectors can install on their own servers. Collectors will have to have some technical savvy, but the scripts should facilitate the collection of popular history on user-friendly, easily customized sites.

Miles Travis
George Mason University
April 25, 2005

Presenting opportunities for the preservation of memories has become an exciting and popular use of the World Wide Web. A recent addition to the online memory collecting presence is The Remembering Site. Based on Bob Greene and D.G. Fulford's To Our Children's Children: Preserving Family Histories For Generations To Come, this site presents a guide to writing an autobiography. Launched in the summer of 2005, The Remembering Site encourages the public to record their lives and share them, either with family and friends or better still, with the online community.

While similar to MemoryWiki and History Lived in scope, The Remembering Site is unique in its approach to harvesting memoirs. Whereas MemoryWiki is completely open-ended in what users may contribute and History Lived simply suggests historical topics for users to write about, The Remembering Site carefully guides users through a thorough assessment of their life's past. For users who struggle to identify which of their stories might be of interest to others, the structure of The Remembering Site is an indispensable tool. The site uses over one thousand questions organized into more than thirty-five chapters on topics ranging from “Elementary School Years” to “Romance and Relationships” to “Vehicles.” The process is completely customizable, as users only answer the questions they choose to, and can add stories which they feel do not fit into any of the proposed categories.

These questions provide a comprehensive and useful starting point for an individual seeking to preserve their memoirs, as evidenced by the completed autobiographies. In presenting autobiographers with a wide range of topics, many seem eager to recount experiences characteristic of multiple eras and facets of their lives. However, this method also has its flaws. Since they are structured in a question and answer format, the memoirs often lack a coherent narrative feel. This framework also seems to lead users to recording only a single story on a given topic, when likely a number of memories would be relevant and of potential interest to researchers.

Perhaps the most promising feature of the site are plans to make public the stories people have submitted. The authors of the site maintain that one of their goals is “to create an Internet-based anthology of personal histories so we may learn from one another.” After finishing their autobiographies, users have the option to either make them available to the world or have them remain confidential, sharing them only with people of their choosing. Currently, only a few “featured biographies” are available, but the founders of The Remembering Site hopes to soon make available a much larger number of memoirs.

As of this writing, there is a subscription fee of $10 to join the site which provides one with the questions and forms to create an autobiography. For an additional fee, professionally printed and bound copies of one's autobiography are available.

Ken Albers
Center for History and New Media
March 2, 2006