Summary
We use digital media to democratize history.
Our digital projects emerge from our engagement with the practice of history in universities, schools, libraries, archives, museums, and local communities.
They are shaped by collaborations with practitioners and audiences, and are produced by teams of researchers, developers, designers, and graduate and undergraduate students.
In 2020, our various projects attracted an audience of more than 2 million unique visitors. To do this work, and to keep our projects free and open access and (mostly) open source, we depend on grant funds from government agencies, private foundations, and individuals who believe in our mission. We also do contract work for like-minded organizations across the humanities, in education, and in public history.
The Executive Director for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is Lincoln Mullen.
News
As RRCHNM enters its thirtieth year, its fundamental mission remains the same. But now it has a new set of plans to accomplish that mission. Over the past three decades, RRCHNM has reinvented itself several times, including in the past few years under the leadership of Mills Kelly.
Here is where we are today and where we are headed over the next few years.
- First, RRCHNM is a leader in creating educational materials for history, especially K–12 education. This year, two out of every three of our millions of website visits will be to one of our education websites. Our educational resources for world history and American history are critical in a period when history education is contested at every turn and its value is called into question.
- Second, we create compelling narrative and interpretative histories for public audiences. This coming year our new podcast studio will release shows about the American Revolution and the history of American antisemitism, while continuing shows on women’s history and the history of the Appalachian Trail. RRCHNM is also working on producing interactive scholarly works on subjects ranging from art history to early modern history.
- Third, we create data-rich histories. We know how to go from historical sources to data sets to rich visualizations. In many ways, these data-rich histories connect back to the Center’s origins in social history and to its practice of giving people the tools to understand history for themselves.
- Finally, we train incredible digital historians. MA and PhD students in history who have graduated after coming through RRCHNM are educators, librarians, DH center staff and directors, professors, archivists, programmers, public historians, government officials, and a host of other roles. Thanks to RRCHNM, GMU’s PhD program has always been one which aims for—and achieves—a diversity of career outcomes with a great placement record.
RRCHNM has a strong team of historians, developers, educators, podcasters, scholars, administrators, and students. The credit for that goes to the previous executive directors, and I am grateful to have had the chance to work for two of them. Stephen Robertson led RRCHNM to create more interpretative histories, and he emphasized RRCHNM’s distinctive identity as a digital history center. Over the last four years, Mills Kelly has led RRCHNM through a major transition, hiring the majority of our current team to accomplish our new goals. He also extended RRCHNM’s reach through partnerships that we formed or continued during his tenure with institutions such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, and the German Historical Institute. And as the host of The Green Tunnel, he led that podcast to over 100,000 downloads and an enthusiastic following among historians and hikers.
I am grateful to have worked at RRCHNM for the past nine years, and I hope to be a careful steward of the Center as I step into this new role. I’d invite you to browse our list of staff and read some of their bios. You’ll quickly get a sense of what I’ve felt daily over the past few years: that this group of historians is doing important work democratizing access to history with an open, collaborative spirit, just as Roy Rosenzweig founded CHNM to do.
About
At the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media we use digital media and computer technology to democratize history: to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.
Since 1994—under the founding direction of Roy Rosenzweig—the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has worked to create digital history and software that is free and fully available to all.
An endowment provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and over 300 donors, and support from College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, sustain the infrastructure of the Center, but we need the continued support of people like you to help us continue to do the work that we do.
We encourage you to explore our projects, get to know our staff, follow our activities, and consider how you might work with us, collaborate with us, or build something interesting with us.
History
Roy Rosenzweig founded the Center for History and New Media
The Center’s origins lay in an agreement between the American Social History Project (ASHP) and GMU in 1990 that provided time for Roy to work with his longtime ASHP collaborators Steve Brier and Josh Brown on a CD-ROM edition of ASHP’s Who Built America? textbook. After the first disk was finished, in August 1993, Roy proposed establishing a Center for History and New Media at GMU. The Center’s first funded projects were collaborations with ASHP and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), beginning in 1995 with a second Who Built America? CD-ROM, followed in 1997 by Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and in 1998 by History Matters.
The Center was first located in Roy’s office in Dickenson Hall on the Fairfax Campus, with computers in the lobby of the Department’s offices.
Michael O’Malley, who joined the Department the same semester that Roy launched the Center, became Roy’s main collaborator, and, in 1995, formally CHNM’s Associate Director. Elena Razlogova, who began a PhD at GMU in 1995, joined the Center as its first staff member, working ten hours a week. When the Department moved to Robinson Hall in 1997, CHNM expanded to two offices connected by a lobby area, which contained computers and a printer – not dedicated equipment for the Center, but available for general use by the Department. A postdoctoral fellow, Greg Brown, arrived in 1997, to work on Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. In 1998, three Graduate Research Assistants (GRAs) from the History Department joined the Center staff, together with a webmaster.
A grant in 2000 from the Alfred Sloan Foundation for ECHO, launched a major expansion of the Center.
Three postdoctoral fellows and two faculty arrived in 2001, as well as two additional GRAs, doubling the staff, which doubled again the next year. Also in 2000, the NEH awarded the Center a challenge grant of $500,000, which it matched in 2001 to establish a $2 million endowment. To accommodate the new staff, in Fall 2001 the Center relocated from Robinson Hall to the Pohick Modules, a set of trailors apart from the History Department. In 2002, the Center was involved in the first of what would be a series of grants from the US Department of Education’s Teaching American History (TAH) program, which opened new opportunities for collaborations with teachers. In 2002, CHNM was also awarded the first of a series of NEH-funded teaching grants that expanded the approach taken in History Matters to fields other than US history.
CHNM entered another phase in 2005. With the funding for Zotero, a browser-based tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research sources, the Center began to work in software development.
That project attracted the Center’s first funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. IMLS also funded a new strand of Center projects in collaboration with libraries and museums, including, in 2007, Omeka, a web-based publishing platform for museums, the Center’s second major software development project. CHNM’s work in the TAH program also dramatically expanded in scale in 2007, when the US Department of Education awarded it a five-year, $7 million grant to build a clearinghouse site. In July 2006, as this expansion got underway, the Center relocated from the Pohick modules to the new Research Building, a humanities outlier among a range of science organizations.
As these projects transformed the CHNM, it suffered a huge loss, the death of Roy Rosenzweig on October 11, 2007.
As these projects transformed the CHNM, it suffered a huge loss, the death of Roy Rosenzweig on October 11, 2007.
Dan Cohen succeeded Roy as the Center’s director, with a senior leadership of three division directors – Kelly Schrum, director of the Education division since 2004, Sean Takats, who succeeded Dan as director of the Research division, and Sharon Leon, director of a new Public Projects division – together with Tom Scheinfeldt, who took on a Center-wide role as Managing Director. The award of a second NEH challenge grant, to build the endowment to $3 million, provided an opportunity to name the Center in Roy’s honour. Beginning in 2009, the CHNM developed a new strand of digital humanities projects – the One Week One Tool Summer Institutes (supported by NEH), the THATCamp unconferences (supported by the Mellon Foundation), and PressForward, the tool for capturing online scholarly communication (funded by the Sloan Foundation). The number of GRAs working in the Center doubled in 2012, thanks to a Provost’s PhD Grant that supported three cohorts of three graduate students a year, who undertook practicum courses at RRCHNM.
In 2013, Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt left the Center for positions at the Digital Public Library of America and the University of Connecticut. Together with the end of funding for the TAH program, a core strand of the Center’s work, in 2012, the departure of these key leaders marked the beginning of a new phase for RRCHNM.
Contact
Email: Center
Locations
George Mason University
4400 University Drive, MSN 1E7
Fairfax, Virginia 22030
Web Links
People
Source: Webpage
Our collaborators span many academic fields and technical specialties.
Our team includes scholars, researchers, developers, programmers, designers, project managers, educators, multimedia producers, and graduate and undergraduate students. Our backgrounds include history, museum studies, computer science, graphic design, teaching, and journalism.
RRCHNM is part of the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. Center directors are faculty in the department. Students from GMU work as research assistants on faculty-led projects, and may also undertake their own digital history research projects as graduate affiliates.
See webpage for more information on team by selecting headshots.
Hernán Adasme
Graduate Research Assistant
Jim Ambuske
Historian and Senior Producer of R2 Studios
Brandan Buck
Graduate Research Assistant
Bridget Bukovich
Engagement Coordinator
Charles Chavis
Senior Scholar
Christopher Hamner
Senior Scholar
Jason Heppler
Senior Web Developer
Kristin Jacobsen
Digital Project Coordinator
Matt Karush
Senior Scholar
Mills Kelly
Senior Scholar and Former Director
Joy Khatra
Graduate Research Assistant
Alexandra Krebs
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Timmia King
Graduate Research Assistant
Alison Langford
Office Manager
Amanda Madden
Director of Geospatial History
Douglas McRae
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Luz Mueller
Graduate Affiliate
Deepthi Murali
Research Assistant Professor
Lincoln Mullen
Executive Director
Mike O’Malley
Senior Scholar
Jessica Otis
Director of Public Projects
Amber Pelham
Graduate Research Assistant
Jeanette Patrick
Head of R2 Studios
Stephen Robertson
Senior Scholar and Former Director
Roy Rosenzweig
Founder and Director (1950–2007)
Kelly Schrum
Senior Scholar
Nate Sleeter
Director of Educational Projects
Brandon Tachco
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Tony Trinh
Systems Administrator
John Turner
Senior Scholar
Rachel Whyte
Graduate Research Assistant
Affiliates
Source: Web oage
See webpage for more information on affiliates by selecting headshots.
For alumni, go to webpage.
David Armstrong
Graduate Affiliate
Rachel Birch
Graduate Affiliate
Brandan Buck
Graduate Affiliate
Clarke Bursley
Graduate Affiliate
Robert Carlock
Graduate Affiliate
Gail Coleman
Graduate Affiliate
Anne Dobberteen
Graduate Affiliate
Cassandra Britt Farrell
Graduate Affiliate
Georgia Ferrell
Graduate Affiliate
Anthony Guidone
Graduate Affiliate
Daniel Howlett
Graduate Affiliate
Janine Hubai
Graduate Affiliate
Katherine Kania
Graduate Affiliate
Jayme Kurland
Graduate Affiliate
Stephanie Martinez
Graduate Affiliate
Caitlin McGeever
Graduate Affiliate
Luz Mueller
Graduate Affiliate
Maíra Rodrigues
Graduate Affiliate
Annabelle Spencer
Graduate Affiliate
Kris Stinson
Graduate Affiliate
Greta Swain
Graduate Affiliate
Cecilia Ward
Graduate Affiliate
Work
Projects
Source: Web page with links
We preserve & share compelling stories from the past to help us understand who we are.
In twenty-plus years of award-winning work, RRCHNM has developed more than sixty projects, including online resources for teachers; online collections, exhibits and collecting sites; open-source software; and forums to develop knowledge and build community among those in the humanities working with digital technology.
Essays on History & New Media
Source: Webpage
See webpage for links to essays.
