This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy. The Spatial History Project was active at Stanford University from 2007-2022, engaging in dozens of collaborative projects led by faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, visiting scholars and others at Stanford and beyond. More than 150 undergraduate students from more than a dozen disciplines contributed to these projects. In addition to a robust intellectual exchange built through these partnerships, research outputs included major monographs, edited volumes, journal articles, museum exhibitions, digital articles, robust websites, and dozens of lightweight interactive visualizations, mostly developed with Adobe Flash (now defunct). While most of those publications live on in other forms, the content exclusive to this website is preserved in good faith through this static version of the site. Flash-based content is partially available in emulated form using the Ruffle emulator.
Richard Pryor's Peoria
"Richard Pryor's Peoria" aims to open up the work of a biography for the digital age. Traditionally, biographers have done their research–rooted around in archives, conducted their interviews, and so on–and then streamlined that research to write the story of the person in question. Our aim is to present an interactive archive of the first two decades of the life of Richard Pryor in Peoria, Illinois.
The site dramatizes, through an array of primary documents, the historical transformation of Peoria from the Midwest's primary "Sin City" into a proudly "All-American City". It folds into that larger story two more personal stories–the struggles of an African-American family both common and exceptional, which made its living in Peoria's red-light district; and the childhood and young adulthood of Richard Pryor, who became one of America's greatest artists and one of its greatest social critics. The roots of his comedy lie in the stories, large and small, of his Peoria.
The site dramatizes, through an array of primary documents, the historical transformation of Peoria from the Midwest's primary "Sin City" into a proudly "All-American City". It folds into that larger story two more personal stories–the struggles of an African-American family both common and exceptional, which made its living in Peoria's red-light district; and the childhood and young adulthood of Richard Pryor, who became one of America's greatest artists and one of its greatest social critics. The roots of his comedy lie in the stories, large and small, of his Peoria.
GALLERY:
Richard Pryor's Peoria Website
