support the troops
For those of you who follow my work through this blog, I thought it right to introduce you to the project I’ve been working on this summer: Pittsburgh Always Anti-Fascist.
It is a StoryMap exhibit of Pittsburgh’s anti-fascist history from the turn of the century (Yes, the institutions that resist fascism pre-date fascism itself!) to the present day. Featuring a bunch of different maps, publicly-accessible artifacts, and a lot of other multi-media features, it seeks to demonstrate the diversity of ideas and tactics within Pittsburgh’s anti-fascist movement and to refute the all-too-common notion that anti-fascists are “outside agitators”.
The project is divided up into three eras: the World War Era spanning the turn of the century through 1945, the Greater Civil Rights Era spanning 1946 through 1975, and the Postmodern Era spanning 1976 through the present day. In each era, you can read about how historical events facilitate the movement’s evolution, how its rhetoric changes over time, and changing notions of who the fascists are anyway.
Additionally, if you are so inclined to contribute to the project, you can do so via this HistoryPin board. Anybody can Pin anything to the board – I decided to keep my moderator privileges relatively thin so that the history can reflect more perspectives than simply my own. Also, since the constraints of my internship only allowed me to utilize one curatorial source (shout out to Pitt Archives & Special Collections), I’d love to see a greater diversity of sources. The StoryMap may be static, but the history isn’t!
In the future, I will update this blog with more reflections on the project. But for now, I do hope that you enjoy it and learn a lot about this city’s fascinating, unflinching, and radical opposition to fascism.
basedonwhat1917 