by Pam Pacelli Cooper October is American Archives Month. As the leaves fall and we turn our energies indoors, we can begin to think about the archives in our own homes: troves of letters never read or catalogued; memories not yet recorded; years of photos cached in disorganized files on multiple computers, thrown into shoeboxes,[Read More]
Research and Archives
Saved from Extinction: An Adventure in Archiving
By Pam Pacelli Cooper President, Verissima Productions Thirty heavy cans of film, each 24 inches in diameter, over 1200 feet of film in each can. Blues musicians captured in their homes, in the basement of a barbecue place in Memphis, Tennessee, and a juke joint in Clarksdale, Mississippi. For 40 years, my partner had been[Read More]
Life Preservers Podcast: Episode 9 – An interview about the history, legacy, and struggle for civil rights.
This is Part 1 of a 2 part interview with Dr. Robert Luckett, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University in Jackson, MS. In addition to a book and several publications and presentations at numerous academic conferences, he has appeared in documentaries, including the Independent Lens film[Read More]
Gabe’s: A Story of Mystery and Possibility
by Pam Pacelli Cooper President, Verissima Productions Incorporated It was a small haberdashery store in Hyde Park, nestled in the shopping center where everyone in our small community shopped for groceries, went to the Optometrist and filled their prescriptions at the drugstore. I did the same, walking the several blocks from our house to help[Read More]
The Secret of the Silver Cup: Opening the Door to Personal History
By Pam Pacelli Cooper President, Verissima Productions The ornate silver cup had been given to my husband at his birth, inscribed with his name and birthdate. When our child was born, the same cup was inscribed again with the name and birthdate of our son. We had always been puzzled by the original inscription on[Read More]
Goodbye Britannica: The Rise of Online Research
The Universal Encyclopedia By Pam Pacelli Cooper President, Verissima Productions All the dishes were washed and put away, and the dining room table was cleared for me to do my homework. That night, it was a report on clocks. I walked down the long hall from the dining room to the foyer where our set[Read More]
Making Choices & Personal History
Context, Context, Context: Personal Historians and American History
By Pamela Pacelli, Personal Historian President, Verissima Productions So you’re doing a personal history for someone and they want to write about their grandmother who was the first woman to vote in her tiny Kansas town. Or, you’re interviewing a 90-year-old man from Pennsylvania whose father fought in the First World War 100 years[Read More]
Palaces for the People: You and the Public Library
By: Pamela Pacelli President, Verissima Productions I was 7 years old and the huge grey building with its copper dome and tall, fluted columns seemed like one of the palaces I had read about in fairy tales. My mother and I walked through the heavy bronze door into a room with marble floors,[Read More]
A Wider View
by Pam Pacelli Cooper Verissima Productions Today’s excerpt from the “Abbott Leonard Cohen Tapes,” recorded when he was 91 years old, provide a perfect example of the ways our perceptions can be altered when interviewing subjects or when reading diaries someone has left behind. For most of his life, Len Cohen’s grandson Rob believed that his[Read More]
