Kathryn Morse is Professor of History and John C. Elder Professor in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, where she teaches courses in U.S. History and American environmental thought in both the history department and the environmental studies program. A graduate of Brookline High School (Mass.), Yale University, Utah State University, and the University of Washington, she is the author of The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (2003), and several articles including "There Will Be Birds: Images of Oil Disasters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" in the Journal of American History. She is currently working on a born-digital, image-based history of New Deal Rural Rehabilitation Programs run by the Farm Security Administration, focusing on connections between land, race, and ideas of conservation. Her interests include the material and environmental history of the U.S. West, ideas of nature, race, and environment in American culture, the power and role of photography in environmental and social history, the digital humanities broadly, digital-focused pedagogy in the undergraduate classroom, and the challenges of interdisciplinary work in environmental studies programs at liberal arts colleges.
Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother is ubiquitous in American visual culture. Yet FSA photographs took thousands of other photographs (174,999 of them), most of them digitized at the Library of Congress. What can scholars learn with instantaneous access to such archives, all keyword searchable within seconds? Digital sources and digital platforms offer scholars and students new tools with which to think about historical archives, ask questions, and formulate and document their arguments. Using her own born-digital project on FSA photography as an example, this talk will explore some of the innovations which illuminate new meanings of such extraordinary sources.
