Digital Projects

Constructing History: Primary Sources

Doing history is like putting a 10,000 piece puzzle together and missing some pieces. We’ve started a blog to explore this process, and have begun digitizing the accompanying primary sources, our puzzle pieces, to show you what we have to work with.

Hudson Valley Apples

Hudson Valley Apples is the product of two intensive sessions carried out by the Bard Digital History Lab over the winter breaks of 2017 and 2018. Five students initiated the project with a first iteration that focused on the Fraleigh family of Red Hook, New York. The four students from the 2018 Winter Session carried the project forward by extending the research to consider two additional family farms of the early twentieth century as well as an example of a tenant farm, a model that is prevalent among the numerous manor estates in the Hudson River Valley.

This website exhibits the content that the students from both sessions gathered through primary source research in three distinct types of archives (local historical society, personal collection, and academic institution); analyzed in the context of the agricultural history of the nation, state, region, and micro-region; investigated in a series of oral histories with current apple growers; and, synthesized into narratives that tell a compelling story of agricultural change.

The Life and Times of W. S. Teator

Thanks to a wonderfully creative Bard College team led by Digital Projects Coordinator Heidi Knoblauch, Upper Red Hook’s legendary apple farmer and collector William Seward Teator (1860-1930), has come to life in a new way through a website they created in a two-week intensive session in January 2016.