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"Time and Place Have Had Their Say": A Digital Historical Context Guide to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Harlem Renaissance author, anthropologist, and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. As part of the modern American literary canon, Their Eyes Were Watching God is assigned in countless secondary and post-secondary classrooms across the United States each year. Yet students find the book difficult to understand and educators find it challenging to teach due to its dialect, racial themes, and nuanced historical setting. In this paper, I argue that better understanding of Their Eyes Were Watching God's historical context eases these difficulties in reading and teaching the novel. I detail and discuss a digital project that I have created to meet this need. The project uses archival primary sources on a chapter-by-chapter basis to illustrate the book and provide historical context through images, newspaper clippings, oral histories, government records, and other documentary formats so that students, educators, and the general public can grasp and appreciate the book regardless of their prior knowledge of Zora Neale Hurston or the history of Black Florida in the early twentieth century. There is little emphasis on historical context in major literary biographies that discuss Hurston's novels and, more specifically, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The relatively few works that do explore historical context are traditional monographs that do not translate well to modern K-12 educational use and are not intended for general audiences. In contrast, my project employs digital tools, open access materials, and mobile accessible platforms to demonstrate the feasibility of a digital companion prototype. Sources have been selected to highlight Florida-based archival repositories when possible. This project grows out of my experience as an archivist and a graduate research assistant in UCF's History M.A. program, on the Public History track.
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7162908238
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