Category Archives: Blogging

Navigating History in a Digital World

When we think of teaching history today, the vast amount of information available to students and researchers on the web offers both challenges and opportunities for building historical thinking skills.  We want students to be able to distinguish between reliable and less-reliable sources; to view information providers critically with an understanding of their strengths and limitations; and to also be aware that—although the internet appears to be a vast collection of knowledge—there is much that doesn’t exist or hasn’t been catalogued or indexed yet, so that relying solely on digital resources—no matter how rich—is going to limit the success of their historical work.

Almost all students turn to Google as a means of beginning their historical research.  But as the readings in this course have shown, Google’s algorithm and the way it “ranks” its findings are colored by its need to enhance its revenue.  Students need to be aware that a Google ranking is not in order of importance or even of relevance; that items that appear at the top of the list may be sponsored or otherwise generated by their own search histories.  Simple exercises like performing the same search on different search platforms, or rewording search terms slightly to see how the results are affected, or simply by performing the same search on different days or logged in as a different user all could be instructive ways to show students the need to approach any web search with caution.

Another way the internet gives a false impression of being a storehouse of “all knowledge” is exemplified by the Google Books project.  The somewhat grandiose aim of this undertaking was to scan all existing books to form a kind of super library.  The ability to search across thousands of titles to develop theories of how language changed over time is just one possibility that excited digital humanities scholars over the past decade.  However, as Sarah Zheng in her Wired article pointed out, Google Books consists primarily of books available in university libraries published over the last two and a half centuries, with a preponderance of scientific texts.  Searching for words or phrases is going to be skewed by this bias.  Further, the limitations of optical scanning itself means that oddities of typesetting might lead to spurious results.  (The favorite example is the change in typography that occurred in representing the letter “s”; earlier texts use a symbol that is closer to a contemporary “f” and thus words like “save” might be read as “fave.”)

Wikipedia is another “authoritative” source that students (and researchers) often use in beginning their research on a topic.  However, it too has its limitations as we’ve seen in the readings in this module.  Wikipedia’s editors have set rules for the inclusive of new entries based on their being at least two “reliable sources” that can be cited to validate their addition.  This skews Wikipedia towards information that has already been “approved” by the academy.  The stories of people of color, non-Western peoples, and people of different sexual orientations tend to be underrepresented in these sources.  Thus, even this crowd sourced encyclopedia that would appear to be more inclusive in its approach is not as open as we might think.

I don’t want to give the impression that the availability of information on the internet is a net negative for students undertaking historical research; online sources still offer so much more access than was available in the past to vast materials—including text, audio, video, and objects—that it clearly is a net plus for anyone interested in tackling a history project.  And there is literally something for everyone, whether they are visual learners who prefer to watch a brief video or slide show, or ones who prefer to dig deep into diaries, newspaper archives, or other primary sources.  It’s just important to balance our enthusiasm for this goldmine of materials with a realization that the same historical thinking skills that applied in the “old world” of dusty books and papers is just as relevant—if not more so—in today’s digital world.

Fifth Piece of the Puzzle: Overview of My Final Project

Beyond Blackface challenges the standard view of Blackface entertainment through the lens of  Shuffle Along, the first Broadway musical produced, written, composed, and starring Black actors.  While acknowledging the racist roots of Blackface performance, it also challenges preconceived notions about the relationship between the use of Blackface makeup, dialect, costumes, and characters by both white and Black actors.  As historian Eric Lott has expressed it, white minstrelsy was based on both love and theft—a deep admiration by white performers of black music, dance, and comedy along with its appropriation for their own ends.  Similarly, after the Civil War, Blackface entertainment offered Black actors, singers, dancers, and composers an entre into the world of white, mainstream entertainment.  Black performers used these racist tropes to advance their own careers, often subtly subverting the message to fight back against these tropes.

My intended audience is students of Black culture, theater, music, and dance, to acknowledge the many contradictions and complexities in the relation of Black performers to their white audience, and to dig deeper into the questions raised by the use of Blackface in popular entertainment.

My major challenges have been that Blackface is such a “hot” topic that it’s difficult for a white writer/historian to address without acknowledging the basic limitations that I bring to the subject as someone who has not directly dealt with racial prejudice.  I’ve tried to acknowledge and balance the many contradictions and challenges in addressing Blackface’s history and leave open to further discussion/study the issues that I’m exploring.  I feel the best way to overcome overly simplistic understandings of cultural history are to acknowledge up front my own limitations and to ask my audience to try to examine their own particular biases in addressing this content.

Digital Learning Project: 4th (or maybe 5th!) Piece of the Puzzle

I finally feel like I’m getting a grip on what I want to accomplish with my project, BEYOND BLACKFACE.  I was able to think through what the contents should be by storyboarding and discussing the project with my classmate, Dayna, as well as viewing the other projects and listening to some of the past student’s thoughts.

At this time, I’ve decided to go ahead and use Omeka as the platform because through its Exhibits features it does accommodate a series of related pages that a viewer can navigate easily through.  I’ve become to prototype some of the material in the pages and am experimenting with the presentation of the material so it is compelling and easy to use.

I also now have a better understanding that the pedagogy need not be presented as a series of “assignments” or “thought questions,” but rather the narrative itself can raise important questions and direct the site users’ interaction with the material so they take away a more sophisticated understanding of the topic.

While I can’t possibly cover this topic in its entirety, I think I’ve whittled down the key examples—from print, audio, image, and film resources—to tell the story in an engaging way.

Next steps are to test the site with a few people who fit the target user profile and to continue to build out the pages to complete the narrative.

The preliminary site with sample pages can be viewed here: http://www.eubieblake.net/exhibits/show/beyond-blackface/going-beyond-blackface

Using Historical Films and Digital Storytelling to Teach History

Cover art

Historical films can be valuable points of entry for students who are more likely to be interested in watching a two-hour dramatic presentation rather than reading a historical text.  Today’s students are raised in a visual culture and popular films can help introduce them to historical topics that they might otherwise not be inclined to study.  Historical documentaries aimed at a general audience serve a similar introductory purpose.  As one student remarked to me, “I’d never read about the Civil War, but I really enjoyed watching Ken Burns’s documentary.”

That said, it is important to emphasize to students that they should be skeptical viewers of any one presentation of a historical event.  Applying their skills as historians, they should question whether the portrayal in a film is accurate and reflects multiple sides of the story.  Understanding that different people might bring different perspectives to their understanding of historical events is crucial in judging the authenticity of any historical or biographical film.  This is even more complicated when the film has been created for a popular audience.  Students should be asked to imagine counternarratives to the one being presented in any film and to employ historical research to either validate or question a film’s conclusions.

I would be inclined to use documentaries over commercial films for students, even though both may have a particular slant that colors their presentation of the historical facts.  Film records made at the time of the actual events—if available—would be most valuable to use.  Still students would be encouraged to examine the films as just one document among many sources that can be interpreted to give a full historical account.

Having students create their own digital stories can be quite valuable in both illuminating the power of short documentaries to explore historical questions but also the limitations imposed by the visual medium.  If they are asked to encapsulate a historical or biographical story within a brief documentary, students will quickly realize that they have to make informed choices about the images, sounds, and visual documents that they include in their productions.  Key questions to consider would be:

  • Whose story are you trying to tell?
  • How can you present this story in a nuanced way?
  • What counternarratives should be included and why?
  • What are the limitations of visual storytelling and how might you overcome them?

Film Review: The Cotton Club Encore

Film Metadata

The Cotton Club Encore (2019 restoration and reedit of the 1984 original, with 13 minutes of additional footage). Director: Francis Ford Coppola; Written by Francis Ford Coppola and William Kennedy (the script was “suggested by” James Haskins, The Cotton Club, NY: Random House, 1977); Producer: Robert Evans, released by American Zoetrope. Accessed via Amazon Prime.

Big Themes

The big themes related to the story of the Cotton Club include racism, segregation (the club was owned by whites and its entertainment provided by Black artists but was only open to a white audience), the impact of jazz music and dance on American culture, and the role of the Mob in promoting and exploiting African-American artists. The film gets a mixed score on its handling of these themes and its historical accuracy. It does address the period’s racism but primarily on a superficial level, and it also suggested that Blacks were allowed into the club’s audience after the Great Depression which is not the case. Its portrayal of black music and dance ranged from exact reproductions of major acts like The Nicholas Brothers and Butterbeans and Susie to more impressionistic numbers suggested by artists of the day. The Mob’s involvement with music is the most cartoonish and melodramatic element of its presentation, with the film focusing on gruesome murders and turf wars.

Key Moments

The Hoofer’s Club sequence (from 0:48): This loving tribute to the classic dancers the Copasetics (including Honey Coles and Jimmy Slide, both of whom appear in its recreated “tap battle”) offers a window into the meaning of tap dance for Black performers themselves, separate from its appropriation and exploitation for the entertainment of whites. The relaxed informality of the performances stands in stark contrast to the more exaggerated and racially tinged formal Cotton Club numbers, particularly the oddly staged rendition of Duke Ellington’s “Creole Love Call” (34:22 and following) that features a topless male dancer moving in a sexually suggestive “primitive” style that would have been out of place in the real Cotton Club.

Checking Into Hotel (beginning at 1:27:45): Black dancer Gregory Hines is shown asking to book a room with his girlfriend (Lynette McKee), who has been passing for white. It’s unclear where this hotel is located—presumably not in midtown New York where Blacks would not have been welcome under any circumstance. However, this scene presents racism in a more nuanced way than simply showing Blacks being refused admission to clubs or hotels. Here, the clerk tells the couple that the hotel doesn’t admit “mixed” couples, thinking that Hines’ girlfriend is white; when she assures him that she is indeed the child of a Black father, he goes ahead and (reluctantly) gives them a room. Eubie Blake, for example, had similar experiences when his second wife—who was very fair skinned—travelled with him. While not stated, the film also was true to the era’s restrictions for chorus girls—they had to be light skinned with straight hair as they are portrayed in the dance sequences.

Teaching and Learning

I wouldn’t use this film in its entirety with students because its melodramatic gangster story overshadows its historical value. I do think portions of the film could be used to raise issues about how it addresses (or fails to address) the period’s racism. For example, I’d ask students to consider why the main character is a white cornet player (Richard Gere) who is represented as having a special sympathy for jazz, while “real” jazz figures like Duke Ellington are portrayed but without any significant role in the plot. I’d also ask them to view the Cotton Club performance sequences and comment on their use of costume, makeup, and dance movements as they relate to the portrayal of these black artists and compare these dance sequences with the more natural portrayal of a tap battle in the Hoofer’s Club sequence. I’d also ask them to consider if the film were remade with the Gregory Hines character as the main focus (rather than Richard Gere’s cornet player) and how this would change the message of the film and its relation to the actual history. Viewers might also question whether the film’s depiction of Mob violence overshadows the racial violence of the oppression and control that the white handlers asserted over the black artists—and whether this might have been a better focus for the film rather than the “shoot-em-up” sequences. Although the original cut is no longer available, it would be interesting for students to compare the 1984 version with this new edit, because the original release gave much less screen time to Hines and the other Black characters.

Digital Learning Project: Third Piece of the Puzzle

Digital Learning Project: Understanding Shuffle Along and Its Times

So far, I have assembled 10 sample images (photographs, sheet music, and newspaper advertisements) that I’d like students to explore, four recordings made at the time of the show’s creation to evaluate, and two films, one by Sissle and Blake shot shortly after the show premiered and one by Al Jolson from about the same period, to compare.  This material was all drawn from research I conducted previously in several different archives and collections to write my book.  I selected these particular items because I think they are the most interesting for historical examination and discussion.

Questions

Some of my questions for developing my project are:

  • How much “back story” do I need to provide for students to understand the material being presented?
  • Should I include sample analysis for one or more of the exercises to guide possible student interpretation?
  • Will students be sophisticated enough to be able to overlook the poor audio and video quality of the source material (all created in the early ‘20s)?
  • How many lessons can I realistically create in the time given to create the project?

Next Steps

  • Explore software that allows for student interaction with images, audio, and video materials.
  • Create a sample lesson experimenting with different approaches to challenging student analysis

Images for Comparison

Image 1: Miller and Lyles in the grocery store scene from Shuffle Along
Image 2: Sissle, Lyles, Blake, and Miller: The creators of Shuffle Along

I selected two images of the show’s comedic stars, Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles.  The first image shows the duo as they appeared on stage in Shuffle Along. Although all of the actors and dancers were Black, only those playing comedic parts wore blackface.  Blackface was a traditional trope carried forward from minstrelsy.  In interviews at the time, the comedians did not express discomfort with appearing in blackface; in fact, they acknowledged that they used this makeup to enhance their comedic routines and to appeal to a large (white and Black) audience.

The second image includes all four of the show’s creators—Miller, Lyles, composer Eubie Blake, and lyricist Noble Sissle—as they were photographed at the time of the show’s premiere.   In this image, all four sport tuxedos and are projecting an image of professional performers, just like the white composers, lyricists, and actors of the day.

The reason I selected these images is that they offer a stark contrast for students to explore between how Blacks presented themselves (and were presented) on stage; what the actual performers felt about the use of blackface and stereotypical clothing; and how these images were used to promote the show both in the African American and white press of the day.  It is interesting to note that Miller was fairer skinner than Lyles but both used blackface to “darken” their complexions on stage–although Lyles was dark enough to not need to sport the blackface makeup.

Another item to explore is color prejudice among Blacks themselves.  The chorines (dancing girls) in the show were expected to be fair-skinned; Josephine Baker was initially rejected for being “too dark.”  This prejudice existed among both Black and white theatergoers and the show’s producers themselves.

Student Activities/Interactions

I intend to pose a series of questions for students first based on analyzing the overall image and then by focusing on specific aspects of the two images to compare and contrast.  I will ask them to view the images alone and as they were reproduced in contemporary newspapers; read contemporary interviews and reviews; and interpret how blackface was both exploitative of and exploited by Black comics.

Another Possibility

Having now seen some of last year’s student projects, I’m thinking that I might be able to work with my podcast, WHAT HAPPENED TO LOTTIE GEE? that I created last semester as the basic “text” for analysis http://www.eubieblake.net/exhibits/show/what-happened-to-lottie-gee-.  This is a 30-minute podcast that probes questions about why Lottie Gee–the lead actress and star of Shuffle Along–failed to establish herself in the (white) theater world after her initial stunning success.  I think for students the podcast would have to be broken down into bite-size pieces that focus on different issues in Gee’s life–which could then be augmented by the actual source materials (newspaper articles, advertisements, audio recordings) that were used to tell her story.   Students would be asked to analyze historic artifacts such as an advertisement for a hair-straightening tonic that Gee endorsed.

Given the time constraints and the need to focus on just a handful of key points, this might be the best way to go.

Second Piece of the Puzzle: Digital Learning Project

Digital Learning Project: Understanding Shuffle Along and Its Times

Digital materials related to Shuffle Along—including original production photographs; programs and advertisements; newspaper reviews; audio recordings made by the show’s stars when it was produced; documentary films of the show’s creators; and subsequent oral history accounts—will greatly enhance the recounting of the story of the show’s significance, the difficulty its creators faced in getting it produced and staged, and its unexpected success.  The target audience will be able to examine and interact with a much wider range of primary sources than could be gathered in one place and go far beyond what can be represented in print.

Beyond the media itself, the website could offer various ways for students to interact with the material through tools like timelines and audio and video documentaries.  I’d also like to survey other possible tools that could give students the ability to explore different aspects of the show, including music, dance, costume/scenery, and blackface comedy.  Trees of influence—showing how aspects of Shuffle Along were incorporated into the Broadway musicals that followed—would also be a possible way to represent the information in new ways, allowing students to enter the name of a contemporary musical and see how it was influenced by the success of Shuffle Along.

My project pitch would obviously be highly influenced by the availability of open-source or inexpensive tools like these, and my ability to prioritize which would be the most compelling for my audience.  I wouldn’t want to add a lot of “bells and whistles” just for the sake of highlighting technological wizardry, but rather I would want to be sure that each selected tool serves the core goal of the site to enhance users’ understanding and appreciation of the great achievement that Shuffle Along represented.