HIST 2630 - Historical Methods - SKIDMORE-HESS: Home
This guide provides library and web-based information appropriate for students enrolled in Dr. Skidmore-Hess' HIST 2630: Historical Methods course.
Welcome
This guide provides library and web-based information appropriate for students enrolled in Dr. Skidmore-Hess' HIST 2630: Historical Methods course, including Recommendations for Starting Your Research, Quick links to Journal Article Databases, Tips for Analyzing Primary Sources, Links to Digital Collections, Historical Dictionaries and Encyclopedias, and more!
Image: "[Photograph of tornado damage, Statesboro, Bulloch County, Georgia, 1928]." 1928. https://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/vang/do:bul026
Documents from Library Sessions
Required Readings
Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South by
On an August night in 1893, the deadliest hurricane in South Carolina history struck the Lowcountry, killing thousands--almost all African American. But the devastating storm is only the beginning of this story. The hurricane's long effects intermingled with ongoing processes of economic downturn, racial oppression, resistance, and environmental change. In the Lowcountry, the political, economic, and social conditions of Jim Crow were inextricable from its environmental dimensions. This narrative history of a monumental disaster and its aftermath uncovers how Black workers and politicians, white landowners and former enslavers, northern interlocutors and humanitarians all met on the flooded ground of the coast and fought to realize very different visions for the region's future. Through a telescoping series of narratives in which no one's actions were ever fully triumphant or utterly futile, Hurricane Jim Crow explores with nuance this painful and contradictory history and shows how environmental change, political repression, and communal traditions of resistance, survival, and care converged.
Fifteen Hurricanes That Changed the Carolinas by
This informative and engaging book tells the true stories of the hurricanes that had the greatest impact on North Carolina and South Carolina, from the eighteenth century to the present day. Hurricane historian Jay Barnes offers an illuminating and compelling account of the Carolinas' most recent storm disasters, Matthew and Florence, as well as thirteen other memorable hurricanes in the Tar Heel and Palmetto States, including Hazel, Hugo, Fran, and Floyd. In Barnes's hands, the examination of these powerful tropical cyclones leads to a broader view of the history of the Carolinas, revealing not only their terrifying and deadly consequences but also the perseverance of the region's people in the face of such extraordinary disasters. In recounting the rich hurricane history of the Carolinas, from the mountains to the coast, Barnes urges readers to consider the storms to come and profiles how a warming planet and rising seas will affect future Carolina hurricanes.
Katrina: A History, 1915-2015 by
Winner of the Bancroft Prize Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year "The main thrust of Horowitz's account is to make us understand Katrina--the civic calamity, not the storm itself--as a consequence of decades of bad decisions by humans, not an unanticipated caprice of nature." --Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster can be traced back nearly a century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing near the Mississippi, on lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated. The flood line tells one important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story that matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood, when policymakers made it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than for African Americans. He explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana's oil industry have been distributed unevenly, prompting dreams of abundance and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today. "Masterful...Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we're willing--and unwilling--to protect." --New York Review of Books "If you want to read only one book to better understand why people in positions of power in government and industry do so little to address climate change, even with wildfires burning and ice caps melting and extinctions becoming a daily occurrence, this is the one." --Los Angeles Review of Books
Image Credit: Rowlandson, Thomas & Pugin, A.C. "India House. The Sale Room.". 1808. Artstor