Week 8

This week we’re going to be doing history with audio. We’re also going to talk about how disease has affected wars and rumors of wars.

Check in on Blackboard.
Listen to this podcast episode and my explanation of it (in the player below, or the transcript).

Talk to your group mates in Slack.
- Is audio a useful way to tell history?
- What is difficult about using audio to tell history?
- Who might you reach by telling history in this way?
- What differences are there between an oral history and the other types of historical podcast I mentioned?
Elect a spokesperson from your group to report back to the main Slack channel (#week8) about your discussion. Then engage with others’ discussion points.
After you’ve finished with this class work, tell me how your first day of online learning went in the #online-learning channel in Slack.
Before Wednesday, do some research online (making sure you keep track of where you find it, perhaps in Zotero and Tropy) about disease and your war.

Smithsonian Folkways Guide to Oral History
WPA Slave Narratives Oral History information
How to make a podcast: Gimlet Academy
Other podcasts (these can also be accessed wherever you get your podcasts):
- Throughline, particularly this episode, “Becoming America”
- The Dig Podcast, particularly this episode, “Honor, Manhood, Slavery: Political Violence from Alexander Hamilton to John Brown”
- Teaching Hard History, particularly this episode, “Using the WPA Slave Narratives”—this may be of particular interest to those of you who are interested in teaching
Audacity is great free audio-editing software that works on all platforms–you may want to use it to make your Small Project #4.
- A good YouTube tutorial on how to use Audacity
- A written tutorial on how to use Audacity

Discuss with your group mates what questions this episode raises for you about the history of your war and also about our current situation. Then discuss how to find out about disease and medicine as it relates to your war. (You don’t need to report out to the main group.)

Make a 5-7 minute recording about how disease impacted your war. Feel free to try to make it sound like a real podcast! You may have to do some research to find 5-7 minutes of material to talk about. You may collaborate with your group mates on the research!
- Use whatever recording device/software you have available to you.
- Please save your recording as .mp4, .wav, or .m4a.
- Upload your file to Blackboard with a filename in this pattern: [lastname]-[firstname]-[date]-[topic], for example, Mullen-Abby-2020-03-14-FirstBarbaryWar.wav.
- If you’re feeling ambitious, you can figure out how to embed audio into a WordPress post and write a blog post about your recording. (You can post that link instead of the audio recording if you choose to do this.)