The past as vivid as the latest YouTube clip? Entrepreneurial PhD student says she'll make an app for that

For most graduate students, passing their oral examinations is satisfaction enough. The morning after hers, PhD candidate in history Rhae Lynn Barnes awoke with an adrenaline rush of purpose, and called her friend Jenni Ostwinkle, a fellow student in the department.

“Guess what?” she said. “I’m going to California to found a tech education company. I’m the CEO and you’re going to be the executive editor.”

One year later, the website they created, US History Scene, has received endorsements from the Smithsonian, the American Histori­cal Association, and the National Council for History Education. A staff of fifteen writes for the site, producing posts that illuminate topics in American history with recorded lectures, video clips, scanned manuscripts, and other­wise inaccessible material from the archives. Plans are in the works for Europeanhistoryscene.com and Worldhistoryscene.com, as well as a smartphone app. “We make a lot of Social Network jokes,” Barnes says. “If we put on a backpack and run through campus at night, brilliant ideas will just come!”

In truth, though, the ideas behind US History Scene are all rooted in Barnes’s own life. Her dedication to sharing historical knowledge began in her freshman year at the University of Califor­nia, Berkeley, during a lecture by slavery and Reconstruction scholar Leon Litwack on the historical background for the nation’s re­sponse to Hurricane Katrina. In mid-sentence, Litwack keeled over. “He had a history of heart issues, and it looked like he was having a heart attack. The TAs tried to help him down, but he grabbed the po­dium and shouted ‘No, I’m going to finish this lecture.’ He showed me how important it is to understand why things were what they were,” Barnes remembers.

Her own commitment to this pursuit was tested when a car ac­cident left her with severe memory loss. Forced “to completely relearn how to learn,” she found an unlikely ally in YouTube: immediately after finishing a monograph, she would see whether she could find any online lectures by the author. The chance to peg abstract concepts to a scholar’s face and voice, Barnes says, “really al­lowed me to immerse myself in their perspective and methodology.”

Her first opportunity to share this technique came while working for the Du Bois Institute on a con­test inviting high school students to research obscure figures in African American history. The task proved difficult for students working with limited resources, a challenge Barnes remembered from her own high school history classes, taught from 1950’s textbooks. “History could feel very detached, instead of what it should be—incredibly relevant.” She began reaching out to teachers with recommendations for online resources.

While preparing for orals, she realized what graduate students stood to contribute. “We all put together huge amounts of mate­rial, and most of it ends up in a drawer somewhere.” Instead, she reasoned, their access to librar­ies and databases could be used to open up the archives to larger audiences. Barnes already had ample experience doing just this. In 2008, researching an undergradu­ate thesis on the print culture of blackface, she noticed that libraries around the country were trying to sell off relevant material. “Obama was in the spotlight, so I think they thought it was time to get rid of this stuff.” Barnes began scooping it up, and since has amassed what she believes to be the world’s largest collection of blackface ephemera. She has been approached by a num­ber of research libraries interested in acquiring it.

When she launched US History Scene in December of last year, Barnes joined the electronic wave of academic democratization that recently crested in edX, the joint online learning venture of Harvard and MIT. What sets her website apart, she says, is that users can write directly to its staff of professional historians, and ask for more information on the material presented. With most OpenCourseWare offerings, “behind the online lectures there’s just a tech guy, and he can’t respond to questions.” In 2013, Barnes plans to move beyond indexing existing lectures, to producing an original lecture series aimed at debunking historical misconceptions.

For now, Barnes is reinvesting all the website’s revenue, and is modest about her success. “I went to Berkeley, I grew up in a Team­ster family. I was experienced in protesting against companies, but founding one was never a plan.” Nevertheless, she does admit to some personal benefit, as she plots her own career as an historian.

“With Google Analytics, I can see exactly what students and teachers are googling every day. I have my finger on the pulse.” In this sense, US History Scene may not only be opening up the acad­emy, but also helping to direct it.

Story credit: Nicholas Nardini

Photo courtesy Rhae Lynn Barnes