About the Project
Future Directions
This project is a work in progress initially developed for a Digital History graduate seminar at the Unviersity of Nebraska-Lincoln. Future steps seek to create a broad comparative analysis with other freeways projects in Omaha—the defeated West Expressway that would have went through middle-class and afluent white suburbs and the half-constructed North Freeway that tore through the middle of Omaha's densest African American community. This larger project seeks to understand how people effectively or ineffectively organized against Interstate Highway land aquisitions and how residential displacement affected communities differently within the confines of existing social and political structures.
Acknowledgements
The author appreciates the feedback, insights, and constructive criticisms provided by Douglas Seefeldt, Patrick Jones, and William G. Thomas over the course of this and various other historical projects. Thanks also go to the staff at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities who has and continues to expose the author to the inner-workings of many digital projects sponsored by the Center. Much of the source material in this project is collected in clipping files housed at the Douglas County Historical Society, for which archivist Gary Rosenberg provided much appreciated assistance. Extra thanks go to the other graduate students in History 970 who provided valuable feedback and helped this author navigate some of the trickier aspects of web design.
About the Author
Resistance and Relocation is developed by Nicholas D. Swiercek, a history graduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interests reside broadly within twentieth century African American, urban, and social movement history. More specifically, he studies the history of race and the Black Freedom movement in the urban Midwest and Great Plains states, comparative social movements, and metropolitan planning in the postwar era. He grew up in Omaha, Nebraska and graduated with distinction from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a B.A. in History and Political Science in May, 2007.