The Web facilitates the exchange of ideas by making research and other intellectual work more easily accessible. Moreover, the electronic medium enhances written essays by incorporating pictures and illustrations and allowing for an argumentative design element.

My master's thesis, "Age of Lost Innocence," investigates the use of Farm Security Administration photographs of children as pieces of New Deal propaganda. A simple design visually breaks up the page without detracting from the stirring black-and-white pictures.

"Art for Trade's Sake" explores the overlap between commerce and culture between 1927 and 1934 and suggests the use of modern art in advertising as a catalyst for this close relationship. Visually, I replicate modern art's characteristic shift of focus and element of surprise by placing the text flush right, where users expect to see a navigation bar.

I created a fairy-tale-like, golden-hued border in "Appropriating Change Through The Brownies' Book," a project highlighting a 1920s African American children's periodical called The Brownies' Book. The text focuses on how creator W.E.B. DuBois used traditional white constructs, such as fairy tales and Victorian portraiture, in a distinctly different way to influence his black audience. Oval and rectangular frames around photos mimic the late-nineteenth-century portrait style.

In "American Icon," which asserts the iconic status of the Brooklyn Bridge in the late nineteenth century, I relied on a black-and-beige scheme to create a sense of nostalgia. The simple colors also allowed the black-and-white images to stand out.

My smaller projects demonstrate other advantages of the World Wide Web: digitized, searchable literature; the display of existing information in new ways; and the ability to incorporate other media, such as audio and video.

Chapters From Emma Goldman's book Anarchism and Other Essays Chapters From St. John De Crevecoeur's Letters From an American Farmer American Design: Geometries Social Implications of Walt Disney's Bambi Destination Freedom: "The Man Who Traded Horses" George Washington Carver, October 17, 1948, and "Echoes of Harlem" Duke Ellington, November 17, 1948