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The American Social History Project announces the completion of its innovative new web site, The Lost Museum: Exploring Antebellum American Life and Culture (http://www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu). This interactive site re-creates P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, mid-nineteenth century America’s pre-eminent popular cultural institution, on the night before its fiery demise in July, 1865. A unique learning resource that combines immersive experience with historical narrative and documentation, The Lost Museum’s cornucopia of diverse attractions highlight the major compromises and conflicts of the antebellum and Civil War eras in U.S. history.
Produced at the CUNY Graduate Center’s American Social History Project, in collaboration with George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, The Lost Museum offers a 3-D spatial exploration of four re-created museum rooms containing over 160 interactive artifacts and attractions; a searchable archive of more than 300 primary documents; and 22 teaching resources geared to diverse classroom settings. These features allow contemporary virtual visitors to experience the fascinating intricacy of nineteenth-century exhibitions and to embark on a search for clues to solve the fictional mystery of who (among social and political groups in the period) may have burned down the building in July 1865. Teachers can choose among classroom activities and other resources suitable for high school and college U.S. history courses.
Eight years in the making, The Lost Museum combines extensive research and writing with detailed 3-D modeling, database programming, and moving image presentation. The site has received awards from the Archivists Roundtable of New York (“most innovative application of archives to the Internet”), Horizon Interactive (Honorable Mention, Education/Training Web site), and Worldfest-Houston International Film Festival (Platinum Award, New Media). Production of the site was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Old York Foundation, and the CUNY Graduate Center’s New Media Lab.
For more information contact:
Ellen Noonan
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 7301.13
New York, NY 10016
enoonan@gc.cuny.edu
http://www.ashp.cuny.edu
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