Guides: Religion in Pittsburgh @ Pitt: Websites

Material Religion and Digital Projects

#DHJewish
The #DHJewish - Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities website offers a single access point to news, events and projects on the intersection of Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities
America’s Interfaith Infrastructure: An Emerging Landscape
From the Harvard University Pluralism Project, it follows "the development of America’s fast-changing religious landscape and stud[ies] new forms of civic and interfaith relationships."
Arch City Religion Project
A project documenting and evaluating religious life and practice in St. Louis.
ARSP: American Religious Sounds Project
A website documenting the diversity of sound in "everyday religious life through newly produced field recordings, interviews, oral histories, and related materials."
Boston's Hidden Sacred Spaces
Sociologist Wendy Cadge, architectural historian Alice Friedman, and photographer Randall Armor have documented more than 60 sacred spaces in and around greater Boston. Sites include municipal buildings, shopping malls, military installations, schools and universities, health care organizations, prisons, mental health centers, cemeteries, senior living communities and rehabilitation centers.
Database of Religious History (DRH)
From the University of British Columbia, the DRH is designed to serve as a centralized clearinghouse for scholarly knowledge of the historical record, bringing together a core of quantified, standardized data with qualitative comments, references to crucial resources, and links to on-line text and image databases.
Digitizing Rochester's Religions: A Public History Projejct
Digitizing Rochester’s Religions is a community-based, collaborative, and interdisciplinary study of urban religious life in Rochester, N.Y.
Ghetto of Venice Collaboration
"Individually and as a group, we develop projects that examine both the specificity of the Venice Ghetto and the symbolic power of ghettos more generally. Our scholarship investigates the history, conditions, physical space, and lived experience of the Venice Ghetto, as well as broader questions about the legacy of the ghetto...."
Mapping Jewish Los Angeles
"Developed in collaboration with the UCLA Library and dozens of community archives, the Mapping Jewish Los Angeles project uses digital tools and multimedia technologies to enable a broad audience to discover the complex histories of the Los Angeles Jewish community."
Mapping Jewish San Francisco
A digital humanities project featuring digital essays, maps, and galleries of primary sources about Jewish life in San Francisco.
Mapping Yiddish New York
Dedicated to mapping Yiddish culture in New York now and then, offering resources for further exploration of this fantastic – once very Yiddish – city.
Material History of American Religion Project
"Working from 1995 through 2001, the Material History of American Religion Project studied the history of American religion in all its complexity by focusing on material objects and economic themes."
Material Religions Blog
Features an extensive bibliography and links to other material religions websites.
MAVCOR: Center for the Study of Material & Visual Cultures of Religion
Housed at Yale University, it focuses on "the ways religions, and especially the spaces and objects they use and activate, look, feel, smell, taste, and sound as well as what religious practitioners say and write."
Partners for Sacred Places
"Partners for Sacred Places, founded in 1989, is the only national, non-sectarian, nonprofit organization focused on building the capacity of congregations of historic sacred places to better serve their communities as anchor institutions, nurturing transformation, and shaping vibrant, creative communities."
ReliginYinz : Mapping Religious Pittsburgh
The ReligYinz project is a dynamic, participatory, and evolving online exhibit that show cases the lived experiences of religion in Pittsburgh.
Rochester Pluralism Project
This archived site documents religious communities in Rochester, New York.
Rochester Reform Trail
An archived site featuring materials from the 2017 workshop entitled "The Rochester Reform Trail:
Women's Rights, Religion and Abolition on the Genesee River and the Erie Canal." Note: some links may be broken.
Sekuru's Stories
Sekuru’s Stories is a digital public humanities project featuring the renowned Zimbabwean mbira player, oral historian, and ritual specialist Sekuru Tute Chigamba.

Pittsburgh

Historic Pittsburgh This link opens in a new window
Historic Pittsburgh is a digital collection that provides an opportunity to explore and research the history of Pittsburgh and the surrounding Western Pennsylvania area on the Internet. It is a joint project of the University of Pittsburgh and the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. Most of the materials in Historic Pittsburgh's Full-Text Collection were published or produced before the early 1920s and are out of print or not readily accessible.

Allegheny City Society
The ACS aims “to perpetuate the historical and social life of that portion of the city of Pittsburgh known prior to 1907 as Allegheny City.”
American Jewish Museum
“The American Jewish Museum, housed in the JCC in Squirrel Hill, explores contemporary Jewish art that facilitates dialogue about art, philosophy and culture to promote interfaith and intergenerational explorations.”
Faith, Race, Place : Confronting Pittsburgh’s religious past to understand and heal present divides.
From Public Source, “Faith, Race, Place” are stories of how Pittsburgh’s fragmented religious landscape came to be and how historical divides are being confronted in the present day.
Homestead Hebrews
"Gathered here are records, stories, photos, and memories about this once-thriving community..."
Lawrenceville Historical Society
Oral History of Islam in Pittsburgh
"An Oral History of Islam in Pittsburgh" is a documentary film that examines the evolution of Islam in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh and Beyond: The Experience of the Jewish Community
"“The NCJW Oral History Project provides a compelling insight into the growth of an important American Jewish community and the contributions made by the people interviewed."
Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project
"..makes available more than one hundred years of Jewish newspapers published in Pittsburgh."
Pittsburgh Public Art Map
Available from the City's GIS department.
Preservation Pittsburgh
"Preservation Pittsburgh is a non-profit advocacy group dedicated to preserving our region's historic, architectural, cultural, and environmental heritage."
Rauh Jewish Archives
Offers three ways to explore family stories: "through profiles, through exhibits and through a searchable database of burial records from Jewish cemeteries across the region."
Squirrel Hill Historical Society
“The Squirrel Hill Historical Society (SHHS) is a membership organization established in 2000.”

Other Websites

Muslims in Brooklyn Oral Histories
This collection includes oral histories conducted and arranged by Brooklyn Historical Society in 2018. The interviews reflect varying approaches to religious observance among Muslim Brooklynites in relation to a wide range of communities and traditions within Islam
Omar Ibn Said Collection
From the Library of Congress, the Omar Ibn Said Collection consists of 42 digitized documents in both English and Arabic, including an 1831 manuscript in Arabic on "The Life of Omar Ibn Said," a West African slave in America, which is the centerpiece of this unique collection of texts. Some of the manuscripts in this collection include texts in Arabic by another West African slave in Panama, and others from individuals located in West Africa.

University of Pittsburgh Library System

Course & Subject Guides

Religion in Pittsburgh @ Pitt

Material Religion and Digital Projects

Pittsburgh

Other Websites