Call for Participants - Interpretative Text

Announcing: Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom: Primary Sources at Houghton Library (SAEF) Call for Participation

For the past year, Houghton Library has been developing a project to digitize and make discoverable materials representing Black history and culture from across our collections. We are moving toward the creation of a publicly accessible digital collections website with interpretative web content contextualizing and engaging with the digitized material. Thanks to generous funding from Harvard Library’s Advancing Open Knowledge Grant program we are seeking five Harvard students with an interest in Black history and writing to contribute website text on the following themes:

• Early Republic - 1780-1830

• Civil War - 1861-1865

• Reconstruction - 1865 to 1877

• Abolitionists - 1780-1865

• Black Voices

We are looking for creative undergraduate and/or graduate students who can combine  digital primary sources with introductory public history writing for a general audience. The SAEF team, particularly project PI Dorothy Berry, Houghton’s Digital Collections Program Manager, and Christine Jacobson, Houghton’s Assistant Curator for Modern Books and Manuscripts, will be on hand to assist with editing, brainstorming, and identifying relevant digital materials to illustrate and supplement the submission. We will be offering an honorarium of $350.00 for final submissions of 1000-1500 words.

Application Process

We are asking potential participants to submit the following:

• Brief Writing Sample - A published piece, a blog post, or an excerpt from a class assignment

• Brief Statement of Interest - A brief (no more than a page) statement on why you would like to participate in this project and what you hope to gain from participating

We will be accepting submissions until June 4, 2021, will inform applicants of their status by June 11th, review drafts by July 11th, with a final due date of July 23rd. Honoraria will be dispersed after final submission.

Submissions can be submitted to dorothy_berry@harvard.edu.

Questions

Questions can be submitted to dorothy_berry@harvard.edu or christine_jacobson@harvard.edu