Current Projects | Messiah, a private Christian University in PA

What do Humanities Fellows do? Here are some projects that our students have worked on or are currently engaged in:

Digital Harrisburg

This image shows university students leading Harrisburg-area high school students in exercises in analyzing the 1900 census of the city through GIS.

Students working on this public history initiative digitized the census records for Harrisburg in 1900-1930 and worked with Harrisburg University of Science and Technology to document the city’s changing population, produce interactive maps, and make new historical arguments about Harrisburg in the early 20th century. To explore four interactive maps of Harrisburg, check out this page.

Former Humanities Fellow, Jonathan Wolf, working with students from Harrisburg public schools during a Poetry in Place event.

Through experiencing poetry, Harrisburg public school students and community residents have connected more significantly to the cultural, historical and ecological roots of the Harrisburg region. Poetry in Place was an ongoing project to host workshops based on field trips to local places of significance. The program culminated in a public poetry reading and high-quality publication of resulting poetry.

The Harrisburg Giants baseball team

The project documented the oral histories of the surviving members of the Harrisburg Giants, an American Negro League baseball team that fully integrated in the 1950s. The film features interviews with both Giants and local historians that reveal how determination and a "love of the game" spirit led the team to win championships and to reconcile racial differences despite the segregation of the early twentieth century.

T. Morris Chester Way Walking Tour

In collaboration with Dauphin County Library System and the T. Morris Chester Welcome Center at the McCormick Riverfront Library, students are working in 2022-2023 to create a Story Map and a series of videos about Thomas Morris Chester, a 19th century Black journalist who championed civil rights. The videos and Story Map feature historic African American figures along the T. Morris Chester Way, a section of Walnut Street between the Commonwealth Monument and the T. Morris Chester Research and Welcome Center. The videos provide virtual attendees dramatic monologues about the quest for parity, equity, and justice in America from historical actors known as the Pennsylvania Past Players.

T. Morris Chester Way Walking Tour

The Lincoln Cemetery Mapping Project

In partnership with Saving our Ancestors’ Legacies and Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, students are working in 2022-2023 to map Harrisburg's oldest extant historically Black cemetery located in Penbrook, Pennsylvania. Analyzing high-resolution images captured through a recent drone survey, the team is digitizing the locations of every grave marker, collecting data at the cemetery, researching the cemetery’s historic newspapers to create a digital interactive map of the cemetery.

Lincoln Cemetery Mapping Project

Civic Club

The Civic Club students

In partnership with Harrisburg’s Civic Club, Messiah University students are working in 2022-2023 to help honor women of Harrisburg present and past. A small garden tour accompanied by audio narratives of the honored women’s lives paint a picturesque scene of early day, and modern Harrisburg in a manner that not only honors the women involved, but also humanizes them in a manner in which their unique identities and lives may be known. The tour seeks to alternate the women being honored throughout the year as an attempt to not only inform, but inspire all young women within Harrisburg and beyond.