This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy.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 Website
(launch website)
Authors
Editor and publisher: Scott Saul
Site designer: William Bottini
Site developers: Christopher Church, Scott Paul McGinnis, and Alex Tarr
Site writers: Camille Brown, Maya Kronfeld, Ismail Muhammad, and Alex Tarr
Cartographer-in-chief: Erik Steiner
Design guru: Ethan Goldstine
This website offers a portal into the Peoria, Illinois world of Richard Pryor’s first twenty years, a passageway into the material he reshaped in his comedy. It is a digital companion to Becoming Richard Pryor, a biography by Scott Saul
There are over 200 documents to explore here, and many stories to explore through them. The story of a family whose family business was a brothel. The story of a black child floating through largely white schools, then finding his home at a black community center. The story of organized vice and the reformers who tried to stamp it out. The story of midwestern segregation and those who battled to dismantle it.
Pryor eventually left Peoria and became one of America’s greatest comedians and social critics. But in another sense he never escaped his past, or this “ordinary” city that was anything but.
This archive was developed at the D-Lab at the University of California, Berkeley and the Spatial History Project under the direction of Scott Saul. Spatial History Project Creative Director Erik Steiner and research assistants William Bottini, Camille Brown, and Alex Tarr made significant contributions to the site design, content, and development.
