• Introduction
• Historians
• Website
• Digital History
• Approaches
• Conclusions

The Braddock Heritage Project: Analog Historians Enter the Digital Age

This explanatory essay will trace the process of that collaboration and explore the theory and practice of digital history. The Braddock Heritage project demonstrated the “the promises and perils of digital history,” as Roy Rosenzweig and Dan Cohen discuss in Digital History: a Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.¹ Local historians on the project sought to exploit the promises of the history web: hypertextuality, nonlinearity, and interactivity. The developmental path from concept to implementation also became a lesson in navigating the challenges of digital history, that is, how to construct an historic narrative through the medium of the internet.

What is Braddock District?

Braddock District is one of nine magisterial districts in Fairfax County, Virginia, a political district given voice in county government through a single elected supervisor. It is in the heart of the county, surrounded by historic sites of national significance. George Mason’s Gunston Hall and George Washington’s Mount Vernon lie a short distance outside its borders. Significant skirmishes and troop movements occurred just to the west during the Civil War. A nearby prisoner-of-war camp held German soldiers hired out as agricultural workers during World War II to compensate for war-induced labor shortages. However, as one of the Braddock Heritage local historians pointed out, “For most of its history [Braddock District] was not a historical center itself.”²

Nor did local historians find Braddock District as a defined community with an identity formed from tradition, family roots, and the heritage of a common past. As they began their project, the local historians discovered that a shared, cohesive social and cultural consciousness seemed elusive in Braddock—certainly since World War II, when rapid growth transformed Fairfax County from a rural, agricultural community to a sprawling suburb of Washington, D.C.

District boundaries and political affiliations fluctuated throughout the latter half of the twentieth century as population density burgeoned. The growing demographic included vast numbers of transients—military personnel on temporary duty and migrants from other states who came for jobs, but had no plans to stay. The civil rights movement and immigration eroded, but failed to completely erase, inequalities of white racial hegemony. Roads, housing developments, schools, shopping centers and malls multiplied, continually shifting, destroying, or recreating the locus of the neighborhood and community, fracturing and resetting geographies of tenuous communal ties.

Nonetheless, some residents of Braddock District could trace their roots in the area as far back as the seventeenth century. Other residents, later arrivals of the post-World War II boom, were now grandparents, heading two- and three-generation families who had remained in the community. They had experienced the suburban transformation of the area surrounding the nation's capital. Together with more recent arrivals, they set out to find the heritage of their community and to discover more about the past of the place they lived.

• Minor Field Statement: History and New Media
• Lee Ann Ghajar, Department History and Art History
• George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

• Introduction
• Historians
• Website
• Digital History
• Approaches
• Conclusions