This revised story of Georgia relies on researchers traveling across the state, creating relationships, enthusiasm and trust with different communities and gaining access to their stories, often passed down through generations but not included in history books. It takes a team effort to find and sift through this raw data, vet it and craft it into a presentation. Lawton, executive director of GVHP and a Digital Humanities Fellow at UGA’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts (where the project is housed), also teaches as an instructor in the Franklin College’s Department of History. He co-founded the project in 2012 with Mark Evans (EdS ’09), director of the Emerging Technology Program at Athens Technical College. T.J. Kopcha, assistant professor in UGA’s College of Education, has advised Lawton on working with educators and students from the start. And so has Lawton’s mentor, John Inscoe, who is Albert B. Saye Professor of History and University Professor at UGA as well as editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia. As an independent nonprofit research project,
GVHP also receives support from the Georgia Humanities Council. Students in multiple academic areas—UGA’s department of history, department of learning, design and technology, the Honors Program and the Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities—have generated original research for the project. For the past three years, high school students at Athens Academy have worked on the project as part of a dedicated class taught by Randy Reid, a member of GVHP’s board of directors. The project’s goal is to spread this collaborative model throughout Georgia, so that eventually students and faculty elsewhere will be trained to contribute their own stories independently. So far, the GVHP has been developing historical narratives for Athens, metro Atlanta and Jackson County. Lawton and graduate students are currently working with various communities and educators in McIntosh County, and in Putnam County, they are guiding community members, students, teachers and administrators as part of a yearlong project with the Putnam County Charter School System.
Athenians got their first taste of the GVHP in November 2013 through “Seen/Unseen,” an exhibit of groundbreaking digital media projects exploring local history at the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, co-curated by Lawton and ATHICA director Hope Hilton. In April, “Seen/ Unseen: Sapelo,” a similar show focused on the history of McIntosh County, debuted at Ciné in downtown Athens. Kiersten Rom (AB ’13), a UGA graduate student in history who has traveled to McIntosh County and also worked with Athens Academy students, likens the GVHP to “putting puzzle pieces together.” Often, research will yield smaller parts of family history that have historical significance to larger events, “and you can see how that part of history illuminates the rest of history for the state of Georgia.” Alexander Stephens, another UGA graduate student in history working on the project, agrees. “I think it’s altering the conversation [of state history],” says Stephens, who works with the Putnam County unit. “It may or may not change interpretations of history, but it will amplify the conversation, bring in more voices.” Those voices often have been historically underrepresented in conventional accounts of Georgia history, notes Lawton, and their inclusion encourages a more honest look at our past. “My daughter’s Georgia looks remarkably different than that of her great-grandparents,” says Lawton. “I want to embrace that. We’re at this remarkable moment where we can stand Lawton and UGA student Laura Nelson (center) speak to Putnam County High School students at the Uncle Remus Museum in Eatonton. The PCHS students are working with GVHP to research communities of slaves in antebellum Eatonton, particularly those connected to Turnwold Plantation, where Joel Chandler Harris worked as a teenager and learned the slave stories that later inspired his Uncle Remus tales.
DOROTHY KOZLOWSKI
28 GEORGIA MAGAZINE • www.ugamagazine.uga.edu