News Page
June 29, 2013 - Cedar Key Oral History Workshop
Dr. Edward Gonzalez-Tennant organized an oral history workshop at the Cedar Key library. While not focused on Rosewood, such events allow us to integrate our findings within local and regional histories of Levy County. The workshop has also led to an agreement between Dr. Gonzalez-Tennant and the Cedar Key Historical Society (CKHS) to digitize and transcribe nearly 50 oral histories. We are planning additional oral history workshops for the 2014 year, and more information about the 2013 workshop is available here.
September 8, 2012 - Rosewood Heritage & Memory Project
The last week of August marked the inaugural fieldwork of a new collaborative project exploring Rosewood’s past. The Rosewood Heritage and Memory Project is the next phase of the work I began with my dissertation, and documented at this site. This blog post briefly describes the documentation of Rosewood’s African American cemetery.
June 26, 2011 - Virtual Rosewood Goes Live
Visitors to the site can now experience a completly reconstructed, virtual version of Rosewood as it existed prior to the 1923 race riot.The layout of the community is based upon the spatial template created by mapping historic property (HP) ownership. The present version was completed between June 2010 and June 2011. In all, the virtual reconstruction took about 600 hours to complete. This does not include the several months in late 2009 and early 2010 spent researching the historic properties.
June 8, 2011 - 1993 Oral Histories Added to Data Warehouse
A group of historians collected fourteen oral histories as part of the compensation bill which made its way through the Florida state legislature in 1993 and 1994. Few people have access to these oral histories because the transcriptions were only published in a limited number of volumes. A small number of these volumes exist in various libraries around Florida, until now.
April 15, 2011 - Daily Weather Info Added to Data Warehouse
Weather has profound effects on our everyday actions. Numerous survivors of Rosewood report how the winter of 1923 was one of the coldest on record. Can daily weather observations from the area around Rosewood shed light on the 1923 Rosewood race riot as well as the experiences of those who survivied it? Visit the weather data page for more info.
March 22, 2011 - Virtual Rosewood Data Warehouse Opens
Various datasets used during the Virtual Rosewood Research Project (VRRP) are currently being placed online. These will include census records, oral histories, business directory entries, maps, weather data, and various documents. Visit the data portion of the website to learn more.
February 13, 2011 - Virtual Rosewood in St. Petersburg Times
The St. Pete Times recently ran a story by Jon Wilson, writer and researcher with the Florida Humanities Council's quarterly magazine Forum. This excellent article was featured on the front page of the Perspective Section and ran across two pages. This one article brought more than 500 visitors to the site, and 400+ spent more than twenty minutes watching the digital documentary. You can view a scanned version of the article here.
February 4, 2011 - Online Virtual Rosewood Prototype Launched
One of the primary goals of this project is to reconstruct the entire town of Rosewood as it existed prior to 1923, and make this available online. While some images and short videos have been produced already, a prototype of the immersive virtual world environment has not been released - until now!
Click here to see the next step for Virtual Rosewood.
January 7, 2011 - Virtual Rosewood Story in Chiefland Citizen
Mark Scohier of the Chiefland Citizen wrote a wonderful and very complementary story of the Virtual Rosewood Research Project in early January. The article was reprinted a few days later in the Cedar Key Beacon as well. Thank you so much Mark for a great story and all the wonderful attention it has brought to the project.
You can read the full text of the story here.
October 7, 2010 - Rosewood Historical Marker Vandalized (again)
The Rosewood historical marker was dedicated in 2004 (click for text), and has been repeatedly vandalized ever since. This typically takes the form of unknown persons wrapping a chain around the sign or its support post and violently dragging the sign away. The sign is typically recovered within a few weeks in one of the many swampy areas surrounding Rosewood. The marker was once again vandalized by unknown persons in late September or early October, 2010. I learned about this from a descendant who visited the area recently, and I documented the area the morning of October 7, 2010.
click here for more