June 2, 2025

ASU Works with the Eastern Arizona Museum to Recover Lost History

Through a new digitization project, the Eastern Arizona Museum and the Public History Program are preserving local history and asking the public to help identify forgotten faces in a growing digital collection.

By Giovanni Barberio

What if a single story could help rewrite a piece of Arizona’s history?

March 19, 2025

Modern Still-Life: Echoes of the Digital Age

Lane Wallace is a dedicated high school teacher with a background in psychology, law, and history, bringing real-world insights into his College & Career Readiness and Intro to Law classes. With experience teaching subjects ranging from World and U.S. History to Drama, he emphasizes practical applications to equip students with essential life skills.

March 18, 2025

Tips and Tricks for Archival Studies

This post reflects on the author’s experience conducting research in Scottish archives, describing the surreal joy of working with centuries-old documents. It offers advice for graduate researchers, emphasizing the importance of taking breaks, recognizing when to shift focus and accepting the challenges of finding original sources.

March 12, 2025

Researching, Refocusing, and Developing a Topic

John Cardoza is a retired attorney and 2023 online MA graduate. After an initial, unfinished foray into graduate history at UCSB in the late 1970s, he attended law school at UC Davis and was employed in Ventura County as a prosecutor and family law attorney.

February 27, 2025

The Cultural Power of Barbecue among Enslaved Americans

Brigitte Brown completed the history MA capstone in the summer of 2024. Her defense video examines barbecue culture among slaves in the Antebellum southern United States. Drawing from a rich collection of oral histories, she explores how barbecue functioned as an important meal created by and for black enslaved Africans.

February 21, 2025

Archival Research and the Importance of Physical Documents

This post by Glenn Summers delivers a tactile and analytical discussion of some sources on the 1913 strike at Leith Docks, a key event during the UK’s Great Labour Unrest. These sources were discovered during the Scotland Archives Experience in June 2024.

June 23, 2022

JOTPY Has Diverse Oral Histories For Pandemic Research

Blog post by Jason Inskeep

During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a constant stream of information barraged humans with alarming news, death statistics, and polarizing political stances. A wide variety of social media, forums, and video conferencing programs provided people an outlet.

November 4, 2021

Fear: The Human Experience that Binds Us

Blog post by Pamela Zupo

Whether it is called the plague, the Black Death, or the Coronavirus, widespread disease has a way of generating fear and outright terror among those living within its invisible presence.  Epidemics, such as the pestilence that afflicted the Iberian Peninsula of Spain during the late sixteenth century still resonate with historical truths that can be felt five hundred years later.

October 21, 2021

Pharmacy in the Middle Ages

Blog post by Keisha Gordon

The past can indicate future events. Pandemics such as the COVID-19 may be new to us but they are not new to the historical record. The 1918 Flu, or the Black Death of the Middle Ages, are familiar to some.

September 29, 2021

Uncertainty and Fear as a Universal Conditions

The Great Castilian Plague of 1596-1601 and the Covid-19 Pandemic of today

By Sarah Peterson

Not much has changed in human history between the Castilian Plague of 1596-1601 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-now. Sure, we understand science and data more than our ancestors, but common themes abound between our shared experience today and the lives of those caught-up in the late sixteenth-century Castilian pestilence.