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Illuminating Our Shadowed Past - Creating a Vermont Eugenics Web Resource

March 15, 2001

Participants:
  • Nancy Gallager, author and historian
  • Helen Greenberg, UVM Computing Services
Length: 1:33:54
Next Air Dates: No upcoming airtimes are currently scheduled

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Tags:

WEB Project, VT's, VT Eugenics Project, Eugenics Survey of VT, creating an eugenics website

Program Description:

Over the past decade, the Eugenics Survey of Vermont (1925 - 1936) has emerged from obscurity into the national limelight as Vermont's "dark secret." Yet the potential of the Eugenics Survey archive and associated historical records to enrich our understanding of this era remains largely untapped. These sources can serve as a catalyst for dialogue about this troubling chapter in Vermont's past, while opening new vistas for research and inquiry in Vermont history. By facilitating public access to primary historical sources on Vermont, the World Wide Web offers new opportunities for collaborative, educational projects within our communities. "Vermont Eugenics: A Documentary History" (www.uvm.edu/~eugenics), initiated and sponsored by the WEB Project, will provide access to over two hundred full text documents and images from Vermont's eugenics era and direct users to additional resources. Nancy Gallagher, author and historian, and Hope Greenberg, Academic Computing Services, UVM, present their work-in-progress on this project. In a preview tour of the Vermont eugenics site, they discuss the relationship between design and construction of a Web-based historical resource and the issues associated with Internet publication of documents on this provocative subject: content selection, potential misuse of the records, and presentation of sources in historical context.