This website, Technological Borderlands, is an aggregator for my historical projects.

The traditional study of borderlands examines the interaction of imagined political communities across international borders and frontiers. Similarly, I like to imagine technology as a sort of frontier and border that shapes and defines human behavior. Clocks changed the way humans understood time. Transportation changed the way humans imagined distance. As such, this site is dedicated to interrogating the history of interactions between people and technology: how and where people encountered technologies, and the roles both people and devices played in those interactions. I believe media has fundamentally changed the way humans imagine each other. They have altered our communal relationships. To this end, the site is currently focused on investigating the history of media technologies: how and where media was used by reporters, journalists, and editors to disseminate information and construct narratives, and how and where audiences received that information.

The site currently aggregates the following digital public history projects:

• History at Play; America Divided (In Progress) – This is an interactive textbook that explores both early and late American history primary sources within a paths based game mechanic system. The system also has an commenting structure that allows students to leave comments to each other about the documents within, and then export their work out as a WCAG accessible pdf.

• The Historians: American Revolution – This is a gaming design project aimed at teaching students how to build arguments. It uses basic game design mechanics to build a gameplay experience linking evidence together to create arguments to gain prestige and unlock upgrades.

• Playing In History – This was a choose your own adventure experience aimed at giving students a gameplay experience that they could use to try and understand the branching narrative structure of how game play choices can frame out historical narrative design and choices.

• Mapping the Lost Cause (1939 Atlanta) – This was a project that merged the Wilbur G. Kurtz Sr.’s 1939 Gone With the Wind memorial marker campaign and the 1945 Land Use Map by the Atlanta Housing Authority. All of the the marker locations coincide well within within spaces deemed “Commercial and Industrial” and “Residential” while few of the markers reside within the areas marked “Areas Occupied Chiefly by Negroes.” That being said,

• Visualizing Southern Television 2.0 – A mapping program that charts the expansion of television broadcast stations and their expanding reach over time and across space in the South. The goal is to track how television spread from major southern urban centers to serve both urban and rural populations.

• Southern Television Database (1920 – 1960) – This database has two goals. First, it serves as the data warehouse for the above mapping system. Second, over time, it will become an aggregator of archival materials relevant to scholars studying mid-20th century television, which I hope will be useful for the future production of related scholarly works in history, journalism and media studies, anthropology, psychology, and other fields.

• The Vietnam Project – I was a graduate student who helped with this project at Michigan state university. The Michigan State University Vietnam Group Archive documents MSU’s role (1955–1962) in U.S. Cold War nation-building efforts in South Vietnam. The project digitized over 100,000 documents, maps, and photographs detailing MSU’s programs in governance, economics, and police training.

• Louisiana Television Stations (defunct) – A mapping program that tracks Louisiana television stations through time and across geographical space. (The API system from google has since gone defunct making the mapping system obsolete.)

• Mapping Georgian Newsprint Publications (Future) – A mapping program that tracks the reach of Georgian printing presses across space and time from 1880 through 1965.

You can find my academic profile below as it appears on his Kennesaw State University’s website:

David Stephen Bennett is a Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy at Kennesaw State University, where he teaches surveys of United States history alongside upper-level and special-topics courses in digital and public history. He earned his Ph.D. in History from Michigan State University in 2020, with concentrations in United States history; African American history; and the history of science, technology, and medicine. At Michigan State he studied modern American history with Dr. Michael Stamm and Dr. Kirsten Fermaglich, African American history with Dr. Pero Dagbovie, and the history of science, medicine, and technology with Dr. Helen Veit. He completed his M.A. in History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2010, where he served as editor-in-chief of the department journal and earned a number of honors and awards, and he holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the same institution, with minors in Humanities and Religious Studies and extensive additional coursework in history.

His dissertation, Framing Atlanta: Local Newspapers’ Search for a Nationally Appealing Racial Image (1920-1960), interrogates Atlanta media and civil rights history across four decades and received the American Journalism Historians Association’s Margaret A. Blanchard Dissertation Prize in 2021. He is currently revising that work for publication, and it is under review at the University of Georgia Press as Framing Atlanta: Local Media’s White Supremacist Disinformation Campaign During the Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. His earlier M.A. thesis, Birth of a Virtual Battleground: Television and the Desegregation Crises of 1957 and 1960, was the university’s nominee for the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools Master’s Thesis Award in Social Sciences.

Bennett’s research investigates the news media’s representation of urban identity during the civil rights era, work that has earned the Madison A. Kuhn Award, the Stuart A. Rose Library Fellowship at Emory University, the Hugh F. Rankin Prize, and a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from Michigan State University, among other honors. His article “The Televised Revolution: ‘Progressive’ Television Coverage of the 1960 New Orleans School Desegregation Crisis” appeared in the Journal of Louisiana History, which also published his review of Darryl Mace’s In Remembrance of Emmett Till; his review of Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield’s Journalism and Jim Crow appeared in the Atlanta Studies Journal. As a graduate student he helped digitize records for the Michigan State University Vietnam Group Archive, an effort funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has worked alongside scholars including Dr. Michael Stamm, Dr. Peter Beattie, Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz, and Dr. Charles Keith.

Across a teaching career spanning Michigan State University, Lake Superior State University, the University of North Florida, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, South Louisiana Community College, and now Kennesaw State, Bennett has increasingly turned toward digital pedagogy and educational game design as tools for teaching historical thinking. At Kennesaw State he designed and now teaches a new Digital History course built to draw majors and non-majors alike into the practice of building public-facing history, and he founded the student Media History Club (since renamed the Digital History Club) to mentor undergraduates through their own research and digital projects. That mentorship has begun to reach wider audiences: one student, Andrew Bramlett, published research on the Atlanta Georgian in the Atlanta Studies Journal and was named a finalist for the KSU Undergraduate Research Award. Much of Bennett’s recent work has gone into a suite of interactive teaching platforms that reframe how students encounter primary sources, casting them as historians who assemble evidence into arguments rather than passive readers of assigned documents. Those platforms, together with his mapping and database work in media history, are aggregated among the digital public history projects featured on this site.

Feel free to email the webmaster (webmaster@davidsbennett.com), with any questions.