Author Archives: Melina Testin

Loyola Passes the Test(in) This past semester, a group and I have been working on a digital exhibit about the Loyola History Department for our final project. With the loss of full access to the archives thanks to an extra-long Corona-induced Spring Break, our vision has changed over the past few weeks. We have finallyContinue reading “WEEK XIV”

Czechs and Balances This week’s readings brought me to the familiar territory of post-WWII Czechoslovakia and the gates of the Terezín concentration camp. This camp held 32,000 political prisoners during the war, including the civil engineer mother of Radek and Joseph Masin, whose oral histories are available through the National Czech and Slovak Museum’s digital collection. ByContinue reading “WEEK XIII”

Choose Your Own Adventure For our digital exhibit final project, my team and I plan to create an interactive quiz game. Always committed to providing the best blog experience, I have decided to use this week’s blog post as an opportunity brush up on my coding skills in anticipation of this task.  The Centralia Massacre,Continue reading “WEEK XII”

History is like Sand: it’s Coarse and Rough and Irritating and it Gets Everywhere The moment I became serious about studying history was in AP US History class my junior year of high school when we covered the Sand Creek Massacre.  My teacher divided the class into groups and assigned each a different primary sourceContinue reading “WEEK XI”

Global Panic? Guess I’ll Draw I have gone 4 days without leaving my neighborhood block and I have since discovered that the only thing able to lure as many Midwesterners outside to stand on their driveways and yell across the street at one another as a tornado warning, is a pandemic. As I sit atContinue reading “WEEK X”

(coughs) I’m in Danger. As Tony Horwitz and Robert Lee Hodge explored monuments to one of the darkest times in American history, the Civil War, in chapter 10 of Confederates in the Attic, my mind wandered to the current dark moment in history, COVID-19. It is hard to think about much else as I post thisContinue reading “WEEK IX”

Drawing on History Monuments have evolutionary interpretations that develop over time with rising and falling relevancy. Monuments of public art tend to have more interpretive flexibility than statues or architectural works. Public art projects showcase a historical memory through the perspective of an artist, and in some cases, allow the public to be the artist. Continue reading “WEEK VII”

A Rumor of Growth Occasionally the image of my 9-year-old self dressed in the gaudy fashion of leggings layered with shorts, leg warmers, and neon Converse, burns itself into my mind at 3am, the overall cringey-ness keeping me from falling asleep. For my readers’ sanity, I will abstain from including a visual of this iconicContinue reading “WEEK VI”

To Farb or Not To Farb In his 1998 book, Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz recounts the lives of Civil War reenactors and living historians, some of whom are referred to as ‘farbs’: “’Farb’ was the worst insult in the hardcore vocabulary. It referred to reenactors who approached the past with a lack of verisimilitude.Continue reading “WEEK V”