About

Site Purpose

The idea for this site came from a research paper I did for my First Year Seminar class a few years ago, A Hero’s Journey. My paper focused on the use of Jewish symbology in the design of Captain America, since the first wave of Golden Age superheroes had Jewish creators. And during that research, I had a few lingering questions, like why these designs were used or how his creation related to the times. After all, Cap debuted at the tail end of the Great Depression while the rest of the world was in the middle of World War II. So I decided to see what was going on in the United States at the time – both historically and culturally – to see what caused his creation and what impact he had during America’s foray in WWII.

How to Use the Site

From the Home Page, there are several buttons that link to different parts of the website, including to the About page (here), the Omeka archive and exhibit, the Sources page, and the Social Media Plan page. While not on the home page, there are links on a menu row under the header image at the top of each page, which will take you to any other part of the site on demand.

The exception is the Omeka archive and exhibit link. The menu has no listing for it since the archive and exhibit are on a separate site, so the button is the only way to access it. To help deal with this, that particular button link is the only one that opens in a new tab, so it’s easy to get back to the main site.

The Omeka link goes directly to the About page of the Omeka collection and archive. From there, the top menu will allow navigation to view individual items, the collection containing them all, and the exhibit. The exhibit is split into two pages, and are meant to be visited in order to follow the narrative chronologically. Clicking on any image on the side of the exhibit pages will link to that particular item’s listing and metadata, which is especially convenient for the newspaper articles. Those were uploaded to Omeka as PDFs, so they are quite large and may need to be clicked on again to open them in a new tab to zoom in and read them properly. It is also the reason they are used infrequently in the actual exhibit; they take up too much space and aren’t very readable there. Once you are done with the exhibit, simply close the tab and return to the main site.