Professor Lassiter has led undergraduate research teams in the creation of seven book-length historical digital exhibits, described below.
Global Activism at U-M
In 2015, the U-M History Department launched Michigan in the World as a public history project based on faculty-student research collaborations to produce multimedia online exhibits for diverse audiences based on the archives of the Bentley Historical Library. Professor Lassiter co-designed the Michigan in the World program and taught the pilot course, “Global Activism at U-M,” during the Winter 2015 semester.
Three student teams produced digital exhibits that represent original scholarship on the anti-Vietnam War, anti-apartheid, and anti-sweatshop movements at the University of Michigan and in the surrounding Ann Arbor community. Together these deeply researched exhibits present historical narrative and curation of hundreds of archival documents and twenty-seven oral interviews. Two of the teams received major Undergraduate Research Awards from U-M Libraries. Click on the title images to visit each project.
Give Earth a Chance: Environmental Activism in Michigan
In Fall 2017, another Michigan in the World student team led by Lassiter created “Give Earth a Chance: Environmental Activism in Michigan,” a digital exhibit about the first Earth Day in 1970, the four-day Environmental Action for Survival Teach-In at U-M, and multiple environmental campaigns at the local, state, and federal levels during the 1960s and 1970s.
The “Give Earth a Chance” exhibit includes more than six hundred archival documents and ten interviews with historical participants. Four members of the research team received the Undergraduate Research Award from U-M Libraries. The project led to the creation of the Environmental Justice HistoryLab, coordinated by Lassiter, which organized a series of public programs to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020 and produced a documentary film about the ENACT Teach-In of 1970. The Environmental Justice HistoryLab also coordinated an extracurricular research partnership between the U-M History Department and the Ann Arbor-based Ecology Center. Student researchers in this collaboration have conducted more than twenty-five oral interviews so far and produced a second digital exhibit, “The Ecology Center: Fifty Years of Education and Activism for Environmental Health and Justice.” Click the images to visit the exhibits.
Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab
In 2018, the Department of History established the U-M HistoryLabs initiative to build on the momentum of Michigan in the World and to present scholarship to broader publics beyond academia through faculty-student collaborations, innovative digital platforms, and community partnerships. That summer, Lassiter launched the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab as a curricular and extracurricular student research project to document the history of police violence and misconduct in the city of Detroit. The research collaboration has produced two major digital exhibits. Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era (U-M Carceral State Project, 2021) covers the 1957-1973 period and includes the most comprehensive accounting of fatal force by any urban police department in the U.S. during this era, along with 100 website pages that reproduce around 1,500 archival documents. (Three students from the “Detroit Under Fire” team won the Undergraduate Research Award in 2019). The follow-up website, Crackdown: Policing Detroit through the War on Crime, Drugs, and Youth, covers the 1974-1993 period and will be published in 2024. A third forthcoming project, Detroit Unaccountable, covers the 1994-2014 period and is also forthcoming in 2024. The Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab is a component project of the U-M Carceral State Project’s Documenting Criminalization, Confinement, and Resistance research initiative; visit the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab’s research page on this website for a complete list of its research publications. Click below for the two main digital exhibits published so far (“Crackdown” will not be live before summer 2024).
“Detroit Under Fire” project featured in the media:
“Digital Documentary History of Police Violence in Detroit-A Review of ‘Detroit Under Fire’” (Urban History Association’s Metropole Blog, March 24, 2022)
“Exhibit Looks at Police Brutality in Detroit During the Civil Rights Era” (Michigan Radio, May 19, 2021), including interview with Lassiter
“U-M Project Documents Cover-Ups of Dozens of Detroit Police Shootings of Unarmed Black Men from 1957-73” (Deadline Detroit, May 4, 2021)
“In the Public Eye,” LSA Magazine (Spring 2019).