As I have begun thinking and researching on my final presentation, I have also begun thinking about what my exhibit topic would be. The point of an exhibit is to tell the story that answers your research question through demonstration. The idea that I have been playing around with would be to make my exhibit topic be about Abraham Lincoln’s ability to get the emancipation proclamation to pass. From there I can then take the three items I have to use in this exhibit and make a map to show off how many regions had slaves before,but no longer did after the proclamation passed. The next item I though about trying to find was to make a statistical chart explaining how much Lincoln gained popularity with the African American population. I have yet to create the items that I have been discussing, however I can link you to the website that gave me the ideas to make these graphs, which is link. I can also use this website to help me with this idea as well, which is, link. I think that the two items I have thought of to be included in my topic begin to exhibit first of all how much of an impact slavery was in that society, and then the next graph plays off of that idea and shows what feelings the African Americans had for the man who freed them from slavery. I apologize for not having shared more with you, but because of my intense fluctuation between topics for a while, it has taken me longer to develop the ideas that I would like in order to make my project the best that it can be. I will have more information soon and look forward to sharing them with my readers as they come.
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April 15th, 2014 at 10:18 pm
You’re doing great, Elizabeth. As you know, Many Eyes is the visualization tool that was an epic fail in class–but that worked just fine for me in the Library and at home, so whichever of the two software programs works for you–great. It might be hard to graph or chart Lincoln’s popularity among the African American population unless you can find definite statistics of some sort. I’m not sure there were approval rating sorts of polls at that time. But there definitely are many statistics about enslaved people, freedmen, their locations–including, actually, the population of Washington, DC at that time–and that’s a useful, graphable statistic to think about. Even if the specific popularity of Lincoln among African Americans proved ungraphable, you’ll definitely find all sorts of qualitative information in African American newspapers and other sources. Frederick Douglass papers might be a good place to look at, too.
Here’s a start: http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/connections/frederick-douglass/ or HathiTrust.
April 16th, 2014 at 2:35 am
Elizabeth, in thinking some more about the idea of visualizing attitudes of African Americans toward Lincoln, I wondered if any useful material would be in the slave narratives of the Library of Congress. These are oral histories done during the Depreession as part of the Federal Writer’s Project of New Deal. The people interviewed are from all over–of course you’d have to search to see if any related to DC are there. If some sort of quantifiable project isn’t reasonable, a sample text analysis of several interviews or comparative analyses might worth considering. Here’s the LOC link: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html