The Lowcountry Digital Library at the College of Charleston is pleased to announce the launch of the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI). Funded through a pilot project grant from the Humanities Council of South Carolina and a major grant award from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, LDHI is an online platform for partner institutions and collaborative scholars to translate multi-institutional archival materials, historic landscapes and structures, and scholarly research into widely accessible digital public history projects.
Innovative digital tools are poised to expand, redefine, and greatly enrich how individuals engage historic and cultural information and sites in landscapes and communities throughout the United States and beyond. In partnership with the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, a major goal within LDHI’s mission is to encourage public history projects that highlight underrepresented race, class, gender, and labor histories in the South Carolina Lowcountry, as well as historically interconnected Atlantic World sites. Webelieve digital interpretation can play a major role in helping to articulate the diverse narratives and experiences so often hidden within numerous historic landscapes and structures in the twenty-first century.
LDHI reflects the collaborative work of local, national, and international scholars, graduate students, archivists, digital librarians, and public history professionals. Current exhibitions include: The Orangeburg Massacre; The Charleston Hospital Worker’s Movement 1968-1969; A History of Burke High School in Charleston, South Carolina since 1894; African Laborers for a New Empire: Iberia, Slavery, and the Atlantic World; Forgotten Fields: Inland Rice Plantations in the South Carolina Lowcountry; and The Pollitzer Family of South Carolina. Featured series include: African Passages, Lowcountry Adaptations, which describes the history of slavery, plantations, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the Atlantic World to Charleston and the South Carolina Lowcountry; and After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas, which focuses on the complex history of Reconstruction that followed the American Civil War.
In the future, LDHI staff will regularly add new exhibitions and series to thesite, and will explore the latest digital tools for developing mobile applications and interactive features to enhance the offerings of this digital public history platform.
Lowcountry Digital History Initiative: http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/
