Review of the Oregon History Project by Katie Galvin

 Do you live in Oregon and want to know more about your state? Do you live on the East Coast and want 

to learn more about the West Coast?Are you looking for a fun digital history project to explore? 

Then I present to you the Oregon History Project. This digital history project includes various ways to discover the state of Oregon. Stories including the founding of the state and its role in WWII. As you scroll down, you get to see materials such as essays, exhibitions, and educational resources to learn about history. By using the search engine, you can type in key terms and photographs to help improve your research. 

I will say that the project leans to an audience of people from Oregon. As a Massachusetts resident, I might be slightly biased towards my state. However, I think it is a good resource if you live in Oregon. I believe there is an opportunity to collaborate with other institutions in other states. Social media posts will help gain attraction to the Oregon History Project and will get people interested in the collections offered. 

Narrative and interpretative essays give different perspectives on the events. The interpretative essays tell stories based on primary sources, offering an exclusive insight about the period. The narrative essays written by Pacific Northwest historians create a story about the region’s beginnings. There are benefits for having the two types of essays. When I was a collections research intern three years ago, I wrote a narrative and interpretive description about an artifact in the museum’s collection. Writing experiences like these help public historians how to write history; what has been told and how one could gain a new perspective. 

There are digitized materials, including letters, photographs, and maps. Along with the description of the materials, you can see the metadata-author, date, and themes-off to the side. And it wouldn’t be learning about discovering the Pacific Northwest without something from Lewis and Clark. 

One amazing feature the Oregon History Project offers is the hyperlink to the Oregon Timeweb. When you click on a collection piece, it is formatted like any other archival page. On the right side of the page, you can see a hyperlink that says “view on webtime.” The link brings you to another page for the collections in an interactive timeline. Every collection piece added to the project is gathered in their respective year and you can drag the timeline across. It is cool to see how many things happened in a certain year. The timeline starts around 1792 and goes into the present. Here is where I can picture in a museum. An exhibit could have screens around the room and visitors are immersed in an interactive timeline. This augmented experience could help people feel one with the history of Oregon.

There is a section for treaties on how to secure the land of the Pacific Northwest. The political cartoon, “O.K., It’s a Deal,” depicts the American deal with Canada to build three dams along the Canadian-Northwest border for energy transmission. The themes of government and the environment are made clear in the cartoon. Different media pieces help show the international relations with the state.  

The project dedicates a page to the state’s role in WWII. Being on the Pacific Ocean, Oregon had to prepare for a possible invasion from the Japanese. As many learn about Europe’s activity in WWII, it is interesting for people to learn America’s role. Women also played a part by joining the workforce while the men were off to fight. This shift helped shape the economy by opening roles to more married women and people with different backgrounds. 

Education resources are provided to teachers who want to teach their students about the great state of Oregon. Materials including newspapers, artifacts, and other essays. It is helpful to provide a classroom lesson about Oregon. Teachers in Oregon would be able to use the page for inspiration to teach their students. This would also be beneficial for museum educators as well. It does not limit public historians. As many students take field trips to museums, it will help them get inspired to come to museums and learn the history of their state. Museum educators can use the page for school programs and can work alongside the archivists to show students what is highlighted. 

They have one online exhibit about women in the workforce. I love that the Oregon History Project talks about women’s history. They seem to have more about women in the workforce in the WWII section, and I think that would’ve been wonderful to see in their online exhibit. I am sure there is room to make it its own online exhibit. I would have loved to have seen an online exhibit about the Indigenous People in the area. Thinking about the Lewis and Clark expedition and Sacagawea, it would be interesting to see if there was research about what the area looked like and who lived there. This could lead to the possibility of a digital interactive map. 

The narrative essay has a series of essays building off the history of Oregon on the page. The segment has the section titles off to the side to read the stories. It helps make it easier to click and read the next story. That I could see formatted in a timeline like on the timeweb. 

If you live in Oregon and can visit the museums there, please do. Being in the physical space with the artifacts evokes emotion and immerses you in the history. However, a digital project like this helps gain a wider audience and is accessible to all. According to Trevor Owens in Archivists as Peers in Digital History, “archival collections are generally understood to be the results of the accrual of records through the process of an individual or an organization’s management and use of documents in support of its ongoing work.” The work of an archivist is never done and the archives serve to preserve history and provide future research and  benefits. 

 Wherever you are, a digital collection allows you the research materials you need to gather the information you need. If you are looking for a digital history project, go to the Oregon History Project!