The family album, travel diary, and scrapbook is still alive and well in the digital age, except now it appears in websites like Flickr and Youtube. Historians are S-L-O-W-L-Y coming to terms with all this, and public historians and historians interested in memory, have been quickest off the mark. I have had really good success teaching undergraduate students (a first-year class in "Landscape and History" and a third-year class in "Historical Representations") taking advantage of the accessibility of these digital archives. Here is what we do:
1) Students are asked to read Steve High, "Deindustrializing Youngstown: Memories of Resistance and Loss following ‘Black Monday’, 1977–1997," History Workshop Journal, 54, 1 (2002): 100-121.
In that article, Steve makes several important points, but among these is how the narratives of loss told about Youngstown, including those by Bruce Springstreen in his "Youngstown", followed closely the narratives of loss told about the American Midwest during the Great Depression, by people like John Steinbeck.
2) Before discussing Steve's article in much depth, I begin class by showing the following:
Not only do students "get it", more importantly this exercise opens up far ranging discussions about the urge to document place, self, community and so forth, through things like mash-up music videos. They wander back into their own experiences, and those of their family, and start to talk about things like "family albums, travel diaries, and scrapbooks". This requires only a modest amount of intervention from me. Students have a terrific capacity for, and interest in, working through stuff from their own lives but from a perspective they had not yet considered. To me this is what being in a university classroom is all about.
