Ripley and John Parker Featured: AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: MAPPING HISTORY App from PBS Now Available

For those of you watching the “Abolitionists”, there is a wonderful new app featuring Ripley and John Parker. Read portions of the press release below:

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: MAPPING HISTORY App from PBS Now Available

Exclusively on the App Store

BOSTON, MA  — American Experience: Mapping History, a free app from PBS that allows users to explore events, characters and locations connected to the anti-slavery movement on their iPhone or iPod touch, is now available on the App Store. The app engages communities around their local history, expanding upon the stories told in the three-part television series The Abolitionists, and connecting them to real geographic locations. It brings events from the past to life and integrates them into present-day American cities. The Abolitionists premieres on Tuesdays, January 8, 15 and 22, 2013 at 9:00 p.m. ET on PBS.

 

Developed with innovative technology from public media history platform HistoryPin, the AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: MAPPING HISTORY App allows users to relive the history of the abolitionist movement by exploring places central to the nation’s anti-slavery efforts. Users can retrace the steps taken by 10,000 freed slaves as they celebrated in Charleston, S.C. shortly after Robert E. Lee’s surrender. In Nantucket, watch a video clip from The Abolitionists in which Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks) tells William Lloyd Garrison (Neal Huff) the moving story of his childhood spent in slavery. In Philadelphia, layer an image of Pennsylvania Hall engulfed in flames over the structure that stands there today, and see how it has transformed over time.

Key features of the AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: MAPPING HISTORY App include curated walking tours of Boston, Charleston, Cincinnati and Philadelphia, where users can find the most significant locations, read about their histories, and superimpose archival images over the street views of those same locations today. Over 30 video clips from The Abolitionists are available in locations ranging from Maine to Kansas.

The AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: MAPPING HISTORY App is available for free from the App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore.

American Experience has worked with hundreds of museums, libraries, archives and public television stations to populate the map with geo-tagged historical photos and documents. The public is invited to upload their own content via the website with the goal of creating a map that reflects the shared history of the movement and its indelible mark on local communities and the nation.