Digital Walking Tours
To make our region’s history more legible and accessible to the public, Augsburg history faculty and students have collaborated with community partners to develop a number of well-received digital walking tours.
- In 2021-22, students will be working with the Hennepin Theatre Trust to research, write, and publish a walking tour in honor of their 100th anniversary
- In 2020, students collaborated with the Hennepin History Museum to research and write a walking tour that brings alive the local sites in the women’s suffrage movement, just in time for the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment.
- History major Matt Berning (’19) developed a digital tour of World War I memorials in the Twin Cities as part of his senior honors thesis
- See all the digital tours — including one on immigration history in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and another on Prince — on the Augsburg digitour website.
Muslims in Minnesota
In this CIC grant funded project, “Mirror for the Self: Oral Histories of Muslims in Minnesota,” students are working with Professor Maheen Zaman to build an archive of life stories and local histories of Muslim Minnesotans. These stories will serve as mirrors for introspection and representation.
Dr. Zaman reflects: “We invite all Minnesotans to reflectively engage these narratives to both sincerely learn about the lives of others and deepen one’s self-knowledge. For our archive’s narrators, the pursuit of knowledge of the self leads to knowledge of God. We hope they provide vital cultural representation to communities under siege so that in the experience of being mirrored in the public sphere they may overcome the paralysis of double-consciousness and strive toward wholeness of self and community.”
Funding was provided by the “Humanities Research for Public Good” grant from the Council of Independent Colleges, which supported several dedicated student researchers. Their contributions will produce a robust and living archive for future public programming and projects, e.g. K-12 pedagogical resources, scholarly interpretations, artistic productions, and public exhibits.
Our official, local community partner is the Islamic Resource Group (IRG).
Historyapolis Project
In 2013, the Department of History welcomed the Historyapolis Project, the innovative public-facing history of Minneapolis directed by Dr. Kirsten Delegard, then departmental Scholar-in-Residence. This history of Minneapolis seeks to make the city’s complicated past relevant to our own times.
Visit the project’s Facebook page to find out more about Historyapolis.
This collaborative work led Kirsten to found the renowned Mapping Prejudice Project, which is now based at the University of Minnesota.