Richard Pryor’s Peoria, a companion website to Scott Saul’s Becoming Richard Pryor (HarperCollins, 2014), has been named one of Slate’s most compelling digital history exhibits and archives for 2014.

As someone who studies history, I often think about how our understanding of the past is shaped by our capability to remember and also to preserve.  In my past experience at the colonial archives, I was thrilled to look through handwritten correspondence, but I always felt that my historical interpretation was like guessing at the image of an infinite-numbered piece puzzle while only possessing a few of its pieces.