{"id":1279,"date":"2017-10-16T13:49:16","date_gmt":"2017-10-16T20:49:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/?p=1279"},"modified":"2017-10-16T13:50:11","modified_gmt":"2017-10-16T20:50:11","slug":"finding-aid-guide-to-the-4th-of-july-orations-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/2017\/10\/16\/finding-aid-guide-to-the-4th-of-july-orations-collection\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding Aid: Guide to the 4th of July Orations Collection"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, we had to explore special library collections through finding aids from the Online Archive of California database. The collection I wanted to examine is the Guide to the 4th of July Orations Collection<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The collection contains four boxes with 150 speeches, orations, and addresses on the topic of American Independence from the time period 1795 to 1876. The physical collection is located in the Ella Strong Denison Library at Scripps College. It is organized alphabetically by author and details the title, date, location, and notes where and when it was printed. Themes of the speeches include revolution, American institutions, westward expansion, party factionalism, and slavery.<\/p>\n

Based on the materials in this collection, a possible narrative could be told about the evolving meaning of freedom and what it means to be an American over the course of 80 years. By looking at the orations chronologically, we can understand what events were going on and gain insight into perspectives of the people at each point in time. The diverse locations of the speeches could also potentially tell us which areas of the United States had differing views such as being more progressive or more conservative than others during the same events in history. For example, speeches in the time of the Civil War made in cities in North could be expressing ideas that all men despite color are equal when cities in the South could be expressing the opposition. The narrative can also be really specific by analyzing a certain time period or event or person. I believe creating a narrative from speeches is really powerful because one could imagine the crowd they were speaking to and the emotion they had behind the words they wrote.<\/p>\n

Something that is missing from this narrative would be the general public’s voice. The speeches and orations were spoken to a crowd, so I wonder who is the crowd? How did they feel about what was happening or what the speaker was saying? Did they agree or disagree? I think this is important because even though prominent figures go down in history, they would be nothing without support in their cause or voice. Maybe some sources to get this information would be newspapers that did articles on the speeches that offered a recount of the scene and an opinion.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, we had to explore special library collections through finding aids from the Online Archive of California database. The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":144,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}