Chronicling a Crisis

A primary source collection of the local impact of the COVID pandemic on a college community which both records and reflects upon the nature of daily life during a crisis.

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Chronicling a Crisis is a powerful primary source collection compiled during the peak of the COVID pandemic between spring 2020 and spring 2021. This upstate New York college was the only school in the state that had to send home all its students twice due to COVID, which attracted international media attention. This book was inspired by the UK’s Mass Observation Project from the 1930s, which drew on the war-time diaries of ordinary British citizens to track the impact of World War II on their lives. With over two hundred blog entries from students, faculty, and staff—including diary reflections, poems, pictures, and thought pieces—this volume lays bare the grief, frustration, fear, resilience, and upheavals of this tumultuous period. This book will be of interest for students of New York history, American history and the digital humanities as well as general readers interested in understanding the impact of the COVID pandemic on universities and their students.

This book is freely available in an open access edition. It can be found in the SUNY Open Access Repository at https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/13052.