Items

• 
  2020-04-01

  Covid Disinfection in Alife, Italy

  I decided to share this video because it will help future historians understand how a small town in Italy responded to the pandemic. This item is of interest to future historians because it shows how disinfecting the town center in a small town in Italy was deemed to be essential in order to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This video is critical for future generations and historians because it will allow them to understand what measures were taken. Future historians can use this video and compare it to pandemics from previous generations and discover what protocols are similar. This video is important to me because my family is from a small town in Italy and it is interesting to see the steps that the town took in order to disinfect the town. I also found it interesting to compare how the United States of America disinfected its towns and how it is similar to the town of Alife.
• 
  2020-09-20

  Coronacation

  In September 2020, myself and three friends took a mini-vacation to Derry, New Hampshire in order to get out of our small town of Middleboro, MA. We rented this house and mainly did our homework and hung around playing games. From this trip, it was interesting to see the difference between Massachuttes and New Hampshire as we saw people leaving restaurants without masks and it felt more “laissez-faire” in a way. This picture connects to “the needs and considerations of an ethical archival collection”. This is because I wanted to show that I, like most people, was not a saint during quarantine and broke the rules at some points. We made sure the house was safe by disinfecting when we got there and other safety measures in order to not get sick. By acknowledging this moment, I wanted to show what I was really like during this time period, not an idealized version of myself that could do no wrong. I know that I haven’t always been the safest and it will help with my credibility.
• 
  2020-10-03

  Smalltown COVID-19

  My experience during COVID
• 
  07/11/2020

  Alex Hinely Oral History, 2020/07/11

  Alex Hinely was born and raised in Northern California. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in sociology. Following graduation, Alex lived in various parts of the United States, including Florida and Rhode Island, before returning to his hometown of Colusa in Northern California. He now works as an information manager for a Princeton Joint Unified School District. In the fall of 2019, he began his studies at Arizona State University (ASU), where he is currently working on a Master of Arts in history. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, he split his hours working from home and campus and began an internship with “A Journal of the Plague Year” COVID-19 archive initiated by ASU. Alex shares a unique perspective as a school district employee, a student, and a curatorial intern. In this interview, he tackles the challenges of living in rural Northern California, where many seem to be disagreeing with California Governor Gavin Newsom, the challenges of social isolation, and how he believes the COVID-19 pandemic is progressing.
• 2020-05-06

  COVID on the Border: Part 1

  I won’t name the town I was in due to operational security concerns but I arrived on 9 March 2020 to a small rural community on the U.S. side of the U.S./Mexican border. I had arrived in support of one of those governmental three-letter agencies and would be spending the next few weeks in the town. For a small town it had all the services necessary to fulfill the needs of myself and my coworkers; restaurants, grocery stores, even a shopping mall. Surrounded by farms, the town was predominately blue-collar and relied heavily on cross-border migrants to assist in the fields. Spanish was the dominant language and a great opportunity for me to recall my ad hoc lessons from junior high classmates while growing up in Long Beach, California. The gig was temporary but would be a new experience in a new location. I was excited. The first night in town I enjoyed a meal at a nearby Famous Daves BBQ restaurant with my coworkers. As we ate our BBQ sandwiches finished off with draught beer we couldn’t help but notice the concerns of news anchors on a nearby television over COVID’s proliferation in the U.S. Each day from that point on the restrictions grew. First barber shops, nail salons, and other non-essential businesses. Then restaurants. A week later the Famous Daves was closed for dine-in. Our world was collapsing. In a matter of a week the town’s fragile economy had come to a screeching halt. Nearby was a large shopping mall that I visited during my first few days in town. I bought a replacement wedding ring from the mall’s JCPenny after losing mine prior to the trip. Now the giant behemoth, that monument to 1980s-90s materialism, was closed. Not a soul stirred. A recreational jog around it found a family riding bicycles in the parking lot. Aside from a few lawn care workers pruning shrubs and palms it was a ghost town. I thought of the courteous saleswoman who helped me pick out the replacement ring; how was she fairing, what was her income like, what was her struggle like now? As these thoughts permeated my mind I couldn’t help but be thankful that I was still in a job that paid. I said a quick prayer for her. Could I help? The mall was locked tight, no way to find out who she was. In just a few weeks of living in this small town during this time of COVID and observing human responses and governmental orders related to the pandemic I was shocked to learn how fragile an economy can be. What did this look like for the future of businesses? Could that large mall ever open again or was it relegated to history, to serve as a relic or memorial to past human behaviors. Amazon had become king. One’s only hope was to live near an Amazon packing plant or own a business that was sub-contracted by the online giant. The farms continued to produce, the trucks continued to drive, but there was a hole in this once tight-knit small town along the border.