See the Inauguration and more from DC

For the next four months, 70+ D.C. college students will be blogging about 20th century American culture and its transition into the 21st century. They will write about American empire on the eve of the 20th century and the 21st; European immigrants arriving in the 1900s and Latinos in the 2000s; the creation of African American Harlem in the 1920s and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s; consumer culture in the 1900s and the postwar 1950s; reactions to the Vietnam War and the Gulf War; and how Americans conceived and used government, more or less of it, from the crises of the 1930s to our own economic moment.

This weekend, students start work as first-hand observers and analysts of the Inauguration of the nation’s 44th President, Barack Hussein Obama: a BHO to stand alongside FDR, JFK, and LBJ. They’ll be on the ground picking up impressions of the speeches, prayers, songs, and balls celebrating the new administration. They’ll sample and analyze the vast material culture of buttons, T-shirts, posters we’re buying to commemorate the moment. And they’ll survey how a variety of media, from CBS to Fox to Facebook and You Tube, are telling the story to people around the country and the world. They’ll present some first drafts of this unprecedented history.

We hope you’ll check in with talkingindc for its Inauguration reports and for thoughts about America – from the nation’s capital – during the next few months.