This page was created by Anonymous. The last update was by Stephen Robertson.
Acknowledgements
In the first instance, this project was part of Year of the Riot: Harlem, 1935, a collaboration with Shane White and Stephen Garton begun in 2010. I had been fortunate to work with Shane, Stephen, and the late Graham White on an earlier project, Black Metropolis: Harlem 1915-1930, a study of everyday life. Their generosity in including and mentoring a junior colleague provided the opportunity to develop a foundation for this publication: the prize-winning website Digital Harlem, created with the help of Ian Johnson, Damien Evans, Steven Hayes, and Andrew Wilson of the University of Sydney’s Arts e-Research team. We conceived Year of the Riot as an extension of that research that drew on the particularly rich picture of Harlem in 1935 generated by the Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem to trace the events of that single year. Funding to pursue those ideas was provided by the University of Sydney and the Australian Research Council (Discovery Grant, DP110104268). As we had for the earlier project, Shane, Stephen, and I shared the task of doing the research. This project relies on the fruits of their extended labor in the archives and libraries of New York City. Our success in gathering that material was due to the continued support of Ken Cobb and the staff of New York City Municipal Archives. To transcribe and enter information into the Digital Harlem database we relied on research assistants Conor Hannon and Anna Lebovic at the University of Sydney. I also owe thanks to Ian Johnson for his continued work on Digital Harlem and for supporting the site even as it became an anachronism in the Heurist platform of which he is steward.
As the map of Harlem in 1935 began to take shape, I was approached to apply for the position of director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. The interest in digital history that led me to develop Digital Harlem had been fueled by the year I had spent at George Mason University in an office down the hall from the Center. There I experienced the inspirational vision of Roy Rosenzweig and benefited, then and later, from his extraordinary generosity. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Department of History and Art History for giving me the opportunity to contribute to Roy’s legacy and lead RRCHNM for six years. Brian Platt, then department chair, provided much-appreciated calm counsel throughout my tenure. I also relied on the support of Mills Kelly, Mike O’Malley, Sam Lebovic (who I thank for his patience with having a former supervisor as a colleague), Matt Karush, Alison Landsberg, Jack Censer, and beyond the department, Deborah Kaplan.
In the scattered and all too brief moments I had for my own research while leading RRCHNM, research assistance from Nicole Cook and Benjamin Mackey was crucial in making it possible for me to map the events of the disorder. The generosity of Lorrin Thomas in sharing her research from La Prensa opened up new areas of the disorder. So too did a comment on the Digital Harlem Blog from Richard Hamm that alerted me to material in the papers of Arthur Garfield Hays at Princeton University. Audiences at the NCPH conference; the German Historical Institute’s conference New Approaches, Opportunities, and Epistemological Implications of Mapping History Digitally; the Department of History at McMaster University; the Columbia University Law School Digital History Workshop; and the Center for Law, Society, and Culture at Indiana University Maurer School of Law offered valuable insights as I groped my way toward a spatial analysis of racial violence.
The opportunities to observe, support, and contribute to projects developed at RRCHNM, and to follow, analyze, and discuss the field of digital history, slowly led me to reimagine the form in which my analysis would be presented. I learned from everyone in the team at RRCHNM, a group too large to name individually. Those with whom I worked most will have to stand in for the group: Lincoln Mullen, Jennifer Rosenfeld, Abby Mullen, Sean Takats, Kelly Schrum, Sharon Leon, Jessica Otis, Megan Brett, Greta Swain, Jessica Dauterive, Joan Fragaszy Troyano, Lisa Rhody, Amanda Regan, and Celeste Sharpe. Beyond RRCHNM, I was inspired by Ed Ayers, Cameron Blevins, Sharon Block, Steven Brier, Joshua Brown, Kalani Craig, Seth Denbo, Jo Guldi, Tim Hitchcock, Jessica Marie Johnson, Jeff McClurken, Ian Milligan, Rob Nelson, Will Thomas, and Lauren Tilton. Conversations particularly important in shaping my ideas took place during the Arguing with Digital History projects that Lincoln Mullen and I convened with the generous support of Donald Waters and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In retrospect it seems inevitable that my time at RRCHNM would lead me to decide that this project needed to be a digital publication, so much so that I do not remember when I made that choice. My first experiments were in Neatline and then in WordPress. As I tried to build a complex set of links and relationships in WordPress it occurred to me that Scalar might already offer the structure I was trying to hack together. Lincoln Mullen listened patiently and offered crucial feedback and encouragement during that process. The development of the digital publication was shaped by the questions of audiences at the Digital Methods and Resources in Legal History conference organized by the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, the workshop to develop the collection Zoomland: Exploring Scale in Digital History and Humanities, the What Makes History Digital? roundtable organized by Wesleyan University, and the Digital History and Theory conference at Brown University (especially Shahzad Bashir and Allison Levy). I also benefited from discussions with the GMU graduate students in my Spatial History course in 2021 and my Digital Scholarship course in 2022. My brother, Craig Robertson, offered a much-appreciated sounding board over the years I worked on this project.
The time to bring those ideas into being was provided first by a study leave from GMU, for which I’m grateful to Dean Ann Ardis for supporting, and then by a National Endowment for the Humanities Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication. For their help putting together that grant proposal I owe thanks to Lincoln Mullen, Lauren Tilton, Ed Ayers, Fitz Brundage, and Jen Serventi and Hannah Alpert-Abrams of the NEH. That I made progress during the pandemic owed much to materials digitized for me by the staff of the Seely G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Emory University Special Collections, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, and interlibrary loans from New York City Municipal Archives. Friederike Sundaram had encouraged me that Stanford University Press Digital Projects would be interested in the project when I floated the idea with her just after she began as editor. I’m grateful that she was still interested several years later and for her work guiding the project through its initial review. Thanks to Jasmine Mulliken for seeing the project through the production process after the announcement of the shutdown of SUP Digital Projects, and to Amanda DeBord for copyediting.
As I worked on the digital publication, Zoom made it possible to reconnect with the now-retired Shane White, albeit without the coffee he used to buy me when we met in Sydney. His imagination, enthusiasm, and warm support have been central to my scholarship for the last twenty years. I am grateful to echo here the shout-out to him as a collaborator and valued friend that I made in my first book.
Delwyn Elizabeth and Cleo Elizabeth-Robertson made this project and everything I do possible. Moving internationally is hard, even harder as you get older, and particularly challenging in your junior year of high school. We decided we wanted to do it again, and it has been the adventure for which we signed up, with some unexpected challenges thrown in. I’m thrilled and so very proud that they too have been able to do things that they would not had we stayed in Sydney, achievements that far outweigh this ‘not book’ of mine. It hasn’t always been easy, but their love got me through. I will be forever grateful. Obviously, this project is dedicated to them.