Landfall: Come by the Combee is a digital audio tour and public history project developed through the National Park Service HBCUI Internship Program. The project interprets the Combahee River Raid not as an isolated wartime episode, but as a living Lowcountry history shaped by Black resistance, military strategy, river geography, freedom-making, family memory, and the public institutions that continue to teach Reconstruction-era history today.
The work connects Beaufort County, the Combahee River, Reconstruction Era National Historical Park programming, and public memory through immersive digital storytelling. It treats the landscape as an interpretive classroom where place, sound, narrative, and historical evidence help audiences encounter the complexity of freedom, military action, Black self-determination, and community inheritance.
The title, Landfall: Come by the Combee, frames the tour as both arrival and return. It asks listeners to come by the river with attention to the people, routes, labor systems, spiritual traditions, military decisions, and family histories that shaped the Combahee corridor. The project uses public history methods to help audiences hear the landscape as a source of evidence rather than a passive backdrop.
Historical Focus
The Combahee River Raid occupies a central place in the project because it brings together the Civil War, slavery's collapse, Black military intelligence, women's leadership, and the fight to transform escape into organized liberation. Landfall emphasizes the raid's relationship to the surrounding communities, waterways, plantations, military planning, and later Reconstruction-era struggles over citizenship, education, land, labor, and public authority.
Rather than reducing the story to a single heroic moment, the project places the raid inside a broader public-history frame. It considers how local knowledge moved through enslaved communities, how river routes carried both danger and possibility, how Union operations depended on intelligence and courage from Black people in the region, and how freedom was remembered by descendants, educators, institutions, and community storytellers.
Place-Based Research and Interpretation
Landfall was built from fieldwork, site observation, historical synthesis, presentation development, and audio-tour design. The project required translating research into an experience that could work for listeners who may encounter the subject through a phone, a public presentation, a classroom discussion, a community event, or a visit to a Lowcountry site.
That translation matters. Public history has to make room for evidence and feeling at the same time: dates, names, institutional records, geography, and military context must sit beside memory, grief, pride, landscape, and the cultural knowledge carried by local communities. Landfall uses digital humanities to hold those layers together without flattening the people at the center of the story.
Digital Humanities as Public Education
The project demonstrates how digital humanities can support civic education outside a traditional classroom. Audio tour design, presentation materials, event documentation, and public-facing interpretation work together to make historical knowledge accessible across community, professional, and institutional settings.
The audio-tour format gives the project a practical educational function. Listeners can move through the material at their own pace while encountering historical narration, spatial context, and interpretive prompts. The presentation format extends that work for public audiences by making the research discussable in community spaces, partner settings, and professional learning environments.
For LILMOD, Landfall functions as a portfolio example of public history translated into an educational system: research becomes a story structure, fieldwork becomes a learning environment, and community engagement becomes part of the public record. It also shows how digital projects can preserve interpretive access beyond a single event, allowing the material to continue serving students, educators, community members, and institutional partners after the original fieldwork period ends.
Community Memory and Public Record
The project is connected to a wider body of Beaufort County public-history work, including community interviews, heritage documentation, local event participation, and reporting from the Landfall fieldwork period. The Ed Allen feature is part of that same public record because it documents how local service, family history, and inherited memory inform the way Reconstruction-era and Lowcountry histories are understood today.
Landfall's value is not only in the final digital tour. Its value also rests in the process: listening to residents, documenting places, connecting institutional history to community knowledge, and building public materials that can circulate beyond the archive. In that sense, the project treats interpretation as a civic responsibility as much as a creative product.
Educational Use
As a teaching model, Landfall can support lessons on the Civil War and Reconstruction, Gullah-Geechee cultural history, digital storytelling, oral history ethics, public presentation, archival research, and place-based civic learning. It offers a concrete example of how students and emerging public historians can move from research questions to field notes, from field notes to interpretive scripts, and from interpretive scripts to a public-facing digital experience.
The project also demonstrates why public-history work benefits from partnerships. National Park Service context, HBCUI internship structure, local community knowledge, public event spaces, and digital platforms each served a different role. Together, they made it possible for the project to reach audiences who might not otherwise encounter the Combahee River Raid through a traditional academic setting.