Browsing by Author "Bestebreurtje, Lindsey"
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Item "Built By The People Themselves": African American Community Development in Arlington, Virginia, From Civil War Through Civil Rights(2017) Bestebreurtje, Lindsey; Bestebreurtje, Lindsey; Ritterhouse, Jennifer"Built By the People Themselves" tracks African American community development as the processes of suburbanization and segregation shaped lives, the built environment, and the law in the northern Virginia county of Arlington from the 1860s to the 1970s. It traces the strategies black Arlingtonians used to create lasting communities that met their own needs and reflected their own preferences when possible within the context of white domination in a Jim Crow society. Since its earliest suburban development, Arlington was made up of diverse neighborhoods, each with divergent, competing visions for the area’s future. Some of the oldest of these neighborhoods were three African American neighborhoods – Hall’s Hill, Johnson’s Hill, and Green Valley. For more than one hundred years, Arlington’s white leaders and developers used zoning, planning, restrictive covenants, redevelopment, and loan policies to limit and attempt to push out Arlington’s black population. Racial division, class division, and competitions over aesthetics unfolded in these battles for space. My exploration of the process of creating and defending communities within the suburban environment analyzes how the physical environment of Arlington reflected racial tensions, as competitions over race, space, and aesthetics literally built a physical manifestation of a county divided under Jim Crow. This study tracks how black communities both challenged and supported white suburban visions. Their community planning traditions highlight the important role the process of suburbanization played in black community development. Key concepts explored through this work are the role of community, and how people used these communities to shape the development of suburban environments through their homes, neighborhoods, and the built environment. Three main themes in this project are to question what constitutes a suburb, to question the meaning of racial separation to see when separation amounted to segregation and when it provided space for black communities to grow, and to question how Arlington’s proximity to Washington, D.C. impacted the area’s development via employment, new residents, physical occupation, and policy. While power differentials meant that white, middle class ideas mostly dominated the suburban landscape, the continued presence of the three anchor black communities and their impacts on the county as a whole show how black visions of suburbanization contributed to the area’s development.Item Digital Humanities Now(Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, 2021) Cohen, Daniel; Takats, Sean; Buck, Brandon; Howlett, Dan; Meyer, Dana; Stinson, Kris; Swain, Greta; Walters Cooper, LaQuanda; Crossley, Laura; Bestebreurtje, Lindsey; Fragaszy Troyano, Joan; Hoffman, Sasha; Rhody, Lisa M.; Schneider, Benjamin; Wieringa, Jeri; Morton, Amanda; Regan, Amanda; Catalano, Joshua; Westcott, Stephanie; Fahringer, Alyssa Toby; Harnett, CaitlinDigital Humanities Now was an experimental, edited publication that highlighted and distributed informally published digital humanities scholarship and resources from the open web. Begun in November 2009, DHNow explored processes of aggregation, discovery, curation, and review to facilitate open and extend conversations about the digital humanities research and practice. DHNow was an experiment in contemporary scholarly communication practices, and served as a case study for the development of PressForward, a plugin for WordPress. DHNow aggregated potential content via RSS from a list of subscribed feeds, which included hundreds of venues where high-quality digital humanities scholarship was likely to appear, such as the personal websites of scholars, institutional sites, blogs, and other feeds—and was open for anyone to join. The project also sought out new material by monitoring Twitter and other social media for stories discussed by the community, and by continuously scanning the broader web through generalized and specialized search engines. Editors-at-Large also directly nominated content from their own networks. The aggregated material was reviewed, nominated, and discussed directly in the site’s WordPress installation using the PressForward plugin. Each week volunteer Editors-at-Large used the plugin to survey the incoming content from both subscribed feeds and their own networks and nominate content for broader dissemination through DHNow. Next, a rotating Editor-in-Chief selected content for publication on DHNow. The site manager then created a brief post on DHNow, linking back to the original content in order to direct attention, conversation, and site hits to the creator.