I decided to look for an article about scrapbooks. I will be fact-checking this article to see if it is real or not. This article was about black history archives that are in trouble. It was also claiming that a 19th century Philadelphian filled hundreds of scrapbooks with newspaper clippings and other materials. But now, underfunding and physical decay are putting archives at risk. Here the steps I took…

1. The article was on a website called “The Atlantic”. I have not heard of this news platform before so i decided to look more into it.

2. I did a Wikipedia search on the Atlantic and found that it is a magazine and multi-platform publisher. It focuses on literature, political science, foreign affairs, and lifestyles. It has a good reputation and has proven to be a trusted source.

3. Now that I trust the source of the article, I still wanted to verify the information. I found the author of the article and her name is Cynthia Greenlee. I searched her name and instantly found many websites about her. I clicked on the first website about her and found that she has a masters degree in journalism, a PhD in history where she specialized in African-Americans, gender, and the law. She is well known journalist and scholar, so I trust the author of the article.

4. I tried to search up the article on snopes.com but nothing showed up. Still, I wanted to fact-check the information.

5. Lastly, to fact-check the information on the article. I decided to search “black history archives are in trouble hoax” to check the validity. I saw that many other reliable news platforms reported on the story.

To conclude this, the story is in fact TRUE.

I have many creative passions and one of my favorites is scrapbooking. If you did not know, scrapbooking is perserving, presenting, and arranging phtotos in a form of a book or card. It is a way of memeory keeping your favourite pictures and pairing them up with art materials such as stamps, stickers, washi tape, magazine cutouts, and coloured paper. Scrapbooks originated from England in the 15th century, although modern scrapbooks have not emerged until the mid 1800’s. I love scrapbooking because i get to be creative, customize it however i like, and I can store and record special events with decorated pages so they are aesthetically pleasing. when i do my scrapbook pages, i print out pictures, this is where photography also comes in because i do them together. i mostly take photos on my phone and then print them out. from there i would tape or glue it into a blank page in my notebook and write about that memory, like a journal entry but it looks more aesthetically pleasing. i write what i did, what happened, highlights of that event, etc. It is a fun, creative way to document moments in my life while crafting. Scrapbooks to me are also more than just photos glued on paper, but its pages are designed to enhance the content of the picture, to tell and express the photo and why that was a special event or moment. If possible, i add a souvenir /token like for example a ticket, pressed flowers, ribbons or reciept. Scrapbooking helps me make that memory more special and creative than just taking a photo. Overall, scrapbooking is a passion of mine because it is a creative outlet for me, it displays and personalizes fun memories, it motivates me to take photos more, and it helps tell stories through photos!