Category: Arts & Humanities, Image, Pennsylvania
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The website provides a visual record of changes in economic, social, and environmental life in the region as depicted in the evolving technology of photography. The time period covered in the website begins with the announcement in the Pittsburgh Gazette of the invention of a chemical process by Louis Daguerre. This process would later become known to the world as photography and would be used by generations of photographers to explore life and changes in Western Pennsylvania. “Life in Western Pennsylvania 1840-1970” is organized into three major categories:
1) Searchable database 2) Timeline 3) Section on preservation and identification of photographs. There are also sections on student activities, picture puzzles, e-cards, a teacher’s guide, and project documentation.
In recent years, scholars in many disciplines have recognized that the literally thousands of engravings, wood blocks, and etchings in emblem books constitute an unparalleled source not only for the study of daily life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but also for extraordinary insights into what the intellectuals of the times viewed as a necessary adjunct to heraldry, social life, politics, philosophy, and moral behavior. The English emblem books scanned for this project are cultural artifacts frequently used in the analysis of reading practices, printing history, Elizabethan popular culture, the use of allegory, and the relationship of word to image.
