Experience Black History: Community Celebration and Remembrance

Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Indianapolis
414 W Vermont St, Indianapolis, IN 46202
July 24, 2016
Time: 12pm to 3pm

The event is a collaboration between the Bethel AME Congregation and the IUPUI’s JustIndy: Tracing Race and Place Project

On July 24, the greater Indianapolis community is invited to join in the celebration of the physical place that is currently home to the oldest African American congregation in the city. The congregation is relocating and starting a new chapter in its long life.

Bethel, the oldest African American church in the city of Indianapolis, founded in 1836, was once a vital part of a thriving African American community located in the heart of the erstwhile Indiana Avenue Jazz District. Over its 180 years of existence, the Bethel AME Church has played a vital role in the Underground Railroad, the founding of the NAACP in Indiana, the founding of the first formal School for Black children in Indianapolis, and the development of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States.
The church building and the property are in the process of the being sold and will soon become a hotel. When this occurs the building will be altered greatly and its heritage no longer discernible.

We invite you to visit the church, experience the history, bear witness to what once was and will never be again.
Transition and change are a part of any vital society but so is honoring and remembering those that have made those changes possible.

Visit the sanctuary, see and hear the A. B. Felgemaker Co., Opus 878, 1905, one of a kind organ, and take photos, share stories, and participate in this historical moment. At 1pm, Joyce Moore from the Urban Patch will speak on the importance of communities using their histories to enrich their futures. For more information, please contact Kisha Tandy, KTandy@Indianamuseum.org and Andrea Copeland, ajapzon@iupui.edu

For more about the JustIndy project, see the JustIndy page

On the eve of our final day of Doing Digital History 2016, I can characterize the past nine days with far more certainty than my next steps. I have been introduced to a rich menu of tools applicable to a variety of research and public engagement methodologies. I’ve also had the opportunity to get to know a cohort of mid-career (and thank you for the flexibility in that definition) historians who have been a delightful community of learners. We’ve shared our skepticism and enthusiasm as we wrapped our brains around r and Omeka, as we played around with rectifying maps and tagging images, and cheered on the Nationals.

I am less confident in articulating the next steps after these heady two weeks. I have dozens of pages of notes to digest and an equal number of bookmarked sites and sources to explore. I also have links to or downloads of more than 20 specific technology tools to experiment with. I’ve always been a digital opportunist – casually using the tool at hand to do what needed to be done at the moment. But now I have a whole new sense of the digital humanities landscape and its possibilities.

So, what am I going to do next? I plan to continue to develop this site, and hopefully keep up the occasional blog. I also plan to develop a second site, http://www.californiamissionlandscape.com using Omeka to create teaching materials and lesson plans to accompany my book of the same title due out this winter. I will explore with colleagues how we can develop an online space to host digital community-based and collaborative projects. I also intend to experiment with some of these tools in my classes. Finally, I will use what I’ve learned these past two weeks to continue to lead the JustIndy project. I hope to apply not just the tools but the concepts and pedagogical issues we’ve discussed to develop JustIndy into a city-wide interactive exploration of the history and spaces of social inequalities.

In short, I leave these two weeks in Arlington grateful for the generosity and patience of those who led the seminar, inspired by the examples of the amazing digital humanities projects we’ve explored, invigorated by the intellectual curiosity and fascinating research of my companions on this journey, and excited to move forward into a digitally inflected teaching and research practice.

The “heritage turn” has been noted by many scholars, and this simple Google NGram tracking the frequency of the terms “archaeology”, “heritage”, and “cultural heritage” from 1850-2007 demonstrates the rising use of heritage and, to a lesser extent, cultural heritage. Interestingly, a search for “critical cultural heritage” produced no results, perhaps reflecting the shifts in book publication since 2007.

Among the interesting issues this simple word use trend suggests is the relative infrequency of “cultural heritage” in contrast to the term “archaeology” which has a much older, but more disciplinary specific connotation. Increasingly interdisciplinary connections within the cultural heritage profession being formed among archaeologists, archivists, educators, preservationists, historians, conservators, anthropologists, and geographers, as well as the various staff of governmental, non-profit, and or cultural organizations and agencies. These heritage professionals are producing important scholarship, as is evident in journals such as Heritage and Society and International Journal of Heritage Studies that claim the common ground of heritage. In spite of the growing prominence of this iterdisciplinary, innovative work, cultural heritage is still a minority shareholder, at least in a linguistic sense within the Google Books universe.

The trend line also raises questions about the branding or public recognition of the emerging heritage field. When establishing the Cultural Heritage Research Center, one of the biggest hurdles was communicating what cultural heritage is. University administrators and potential funders know what archaeology is, but were only vaguely familiar with cultural heritage. And the premise articulated by Rodney Harrison, Laurajane Smith, and other leading figures in critical cultural heritage only further complicates the branding challenge. Because critical heritage studies recognizes that heritage is itself a construct that can be used to understand historical and material expressions of social difference and exercises of power, it is a powerful and important analytical lens. But for the heritage studies, an emerging field of heritage that has yet to achieve visibility in popular discourse, deconstruction seems to undermine the legitimacy of the enterprise.

Finally, the trend lines suggest that there is much work to be done in about the “value of heritage” in the basic literacy of communities. What is heritage? What is cultural heritage? Who cares and why? Digital humanities, and particularly text analysis tools that can mine massive numbers of documents, seem useful for beginning to explore these questions.

To experiment with ThingLink, one of the new tools we were introduced to in our second day of Doing Digital History, I used an 1888 engraving of Mission Santa Barbara’s “sacred garden” as a base image. I then tagged it with a label and a note, and added links to images that similarly used the visual convention of the posed padre in front of the fountain.

I make a more in-depth argument about the interplay of the marketing of the missions and the reception of the growing body of mission visual culture at the turn of the 20th century in my forthcoming book, California Mission Landscapes: Race, Memory, and the Politics of Heritage (U. Minnesota Press). This simple exercise in annotating images raised similar challenges as the monograph. The similarities of the visual compositions of the images are fairly obvious. But the significance of those posed figures is far more complex and nuanced than simple tags can convey. The conventions of posed “exotic” figures mirrors similar practices at the Alhambra and other iconic monuments on tourist routes around the Mediterranean. The presentation of the missions as monastic sites with landscapes reminiscent of centuries’ old European garden traditions helped to elide the Catholic parishes with the enthusiasts of both romanticizing California’s colonial origins and promoting tourism in the increasingly Anglo-dominated social and political elite of the state.

The constructed gaze of the mission gardens is evident in the assembled montage of ThingLink tags, but the historical context is less evident. How is this more cogent than a Pinterest board? And what’s the deal with the banner ad I’m apparently stuck with? I am left intrigued but not yet convinced of the potential of annotating images as a tool for engaging with visual culture. And I look forward to learning more about how others are mobilizing these tools in productive ways.