At 4:30 on Monday, February 29, 2016,
in the Rare Books Room of the Coates Library, Professor Judy Giesberg will draw
back the curtain on the daily private life of Emilie Davis, an African-American
living in Philadelphia during the Civil War. “The Memorable Days” website is the product of
Dr Giesberg’s digital history project, which turned the contents of three years
of personal diaries into a publicly accessible website. The students in Dr. Lauren Turek’s
public history course (HIST-3392 “History, Memory, and Interpretation”) will be
particularly interested in learning the details of transcribing, digitizing,
and organizing these primary sources, and everyone in attendance, including the
students in HIST-1360, Dr. Salvucci’s survey course “U.S. History through
Reconstruction,” is likely to gain fascinating insights into the quotidian
activities of a woman of color living in the North during 1863, 1864, and 1865,
the span of years her diaries cover.
Dr. Geisberg earned her B.A. in
history here at Trinity in 1988, went on to do her master’s and Ph.D. work at Boston College, and now teaches history at
Villanova, specializing in the U.S. Civil War and in women’s history.
--Bea Caraway
