Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic sent New York City into quarantine, Professors Susan Smith-Peter and Joseph Frusci (College of Staten Island) created a Facebook community page so that the Staten Island community could share their stories, as well as their digital photos and videos to show how the pandemic was impacting their lives. Prof. Frusci had students conduct oral histories, while Prof. Smith-Peter’s archival studies class cataloged the digital collections of the Facebook page. The Museum of the City of New York chose 7 items from the Facebook page out of more than 20,000 submissions for their exhibit New York Responds: The First Six Months, which dealt with COVID in NYC. The presentation will showcase how the oral histories and the material collected through the Facebook page were integrated into coursework that allowed students to become the historians of their communities.
