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]]>Introduction:
Credible sources are essential to improving both the reliability and credibility of Wikipedia as an academic resource. Read More
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]]>Introduction:
Credible sources are essential to improving both the reliability and credibility of Wikipedia as an academic resource. During the Wiki Edit-a-Thon at York University, we worked under the supervision of York University Data Visualization and Analytics Librarian Alexandra Wong as placement students in HIST 4840: Public History, taught by Professor Jennifer Bonnell. The edit-a-thon followed the theme of Black joy and love, which was a shift from Canadian Black history programs that often center around enslavement. Through the placement, we were finally able to engage with Wikipedia academically.
During our placement [similar to an internship in the U.S.], it surprised us to discover how severely underrepresented the Black community was in Wikipedia’s U.S. editor population. Black and African-American editors accounted for only 0.5% of Wikipedia’s editors in 2021, noted LiAnna Davis in a post for Wiki Education. From this, I also questioned how much of that 0.5% were Black-identifying women or non-binary individuals. It is apparent that Wikipedia is aware of its bias, as seen in Wikipedia articles such as Wikipedia: Systemic bias and Racial bias. According to the Systemic bias Wikipedia page, the “average” Wikipedia user is described as “white, male, technically inclined, formally educated, speaks English, aged 15-49, from a developed, Christian dominated country, from the Northern Hemisphere, and is enrolled as a student or a white collar worker.” From this, we concluded that the lack of diversity on Wikipedia likely leads to a lack of diverse articles on the platform.
Alanna’s Perspective:
This discourse of diversity and inclusion on Wikipedia became my central focus for the Edit-a-thon and our placement. I questioned how I could be an active contributor to Wikipedia as I wanted to bring more visibility toward the public history of the Black community in Canada and focus on Black excellence and agency. With this goal, I decided to edit the History of Caribana Wikipedia page. I was drawn to the idea of researching Caribana (an annual Caribbean festival from July to August that includes a street parade and exhibits Caribbean food and culture) as Toronto has a big, diverse Caribbean population, and I felt that more historical analysis could be paid to the community. In other words, my goal was to counteract the erasure of the Caribbean Canadian community. The History of Caribana page only included information on the festival’s history between 1967-1971. Thus, I focused on the origins of the festival and how it evolved between 1972-1992. There was an abundance of Caribana archival material in York University’s Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, such as documents from the Kenneth Shah fonds [records]. I also took advantage of historical newspapers that covered Caribana events through this twenty-year era such as The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and Share. At first, I was concerned with how Wikipedia might react to these primary sources I included, as citations in Wikipedia articles are often from secondary research. However, I concluded that my research only allows the article to develop into a more enhanced Wikipedia article with reliable primary sources–something that is not often seen in Wikipedia articles.
Leena’s Perspective:
As a student I was taught to look for biases within articles; however, I had not considered that biases could go beyond the actual language of the piece. Wikipedia’s lack of Black editors shocked me but also explained the lack of visibility for many Black public figures and Black-owned businesses. This brought into question the meaning of diversity as I realized it was more than the images on my screen but also the teams that brought these images to life.
To explore the themes of Black Love and Joy, I worked on elevating The Congress of Black Women of Canada. Otherwise known as the CBWC, they are a non-profit organization dedicated to the safety and betterment of Black women. It was through browsing the fonds collection of Jean Augustine, the former CBWC president, that I learned of the Congress of Black Women of Canada. I tasked myself with taking notes and researching further to add more context to the Wikipedia page. Initially, the page only had two lines that explained its conception as well as Jean Augustine’s former role as president of the Toronto chapter. The work involved with my research felt rewarding, as I mapped out how I could bring it to the Congress’s Wikipedia page. Over time, I added a significant amount of information to the page and made sure to cross-reference when I could to ensure accurate information and to lead more readers to discover the article through interacting with related articles. Wikipedia’s database felt like a spider web of sorts, as it allowed me to string along other aspects from other articles using hyperlinks. This increased the visibility of the page by providing it with more legitimacy. However, this work also left me quite disheartened at times as it forced me to realize just how many important Black Canadian women are left out of history.
Many of these women did not have pre-existing articles so I could not link to their pages. In fact, doing so would have created red highlighted hyperlinks, which would have risked the legitimacy of the page. The work took a great emotional toll, but it did not deter me from completing what I was set to do. I managed to incorporate a fair amount of historical context to the article with the assistance of Jean Augustine’s fonds and cross-referencing my findings with articles from the Globe and Mail as well as the Congress’ own website. It felt like a healing process as I put together the pieces from various sources to portray the history of the organization.
Conclusion:
Our work in the Public History placement taught us that despite the invisibility that Black Canadians are faced with, information is out there. Black history is present and can be active so long as we are willing to find it. The Edit-a-thon and the changes we made to our chosen Wikipedia pages allowed us to acknowledge that Wikipedia can be used as a space to preserve public history. It has also granted me (Leena) the confidence to pursue a future in Information Studies. I know now that not only does my voice matter but that I can uplift others in even the smallest of ways. To learn in a classroom is a great privilege. However, having hands-on experience is invaluable.
~Alanna Brown (she/her) is a Jamaican-Canadian Bachelor of Arts History graduate from York University. She is interested in diversity & inclusion in GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), along with Canadian feminist movements and Black Canadian/Caribbean Canadian history.
Social media: @rootedinnoire on Instagram
~Leena Hussein (she/her) is a Sudanese-Canadian student with a strong passion for Black
history across the African diaspora. She graduated from York University with a
Bachelor of Arts degree in English and History, and is a student in the University of Toronto’s Master’s of Information program.
Social media, Instagram username: Leena.tahirr
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]]>We begin this issue with the third installment of our series, “Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution” (see Part 1, “Considering the Revolution: Indigenous Histories and Memory in Alaska, Hawai‘i, and the Indigenous Plateau” and “Decolonizing Museums, Memorials, and Monuments” in the November 2021 issue, and Part 2, Jean-Pierre Morin’s “Considering the Revolution: The Identities Created by the American Revolutionary War,” in the February 2023 issue). Read More
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]]>We begin this issue with the third installment of our series, “Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution” (see Part 1, “Considering the Revolution: Indigenous Histories and Memory in Alaska, Hawai‘i, and the Indigenous Plateau” and “Decolonizing Museums, Memorials, and Monuments” in the November 2021 issue, and Part 2, Jean-Pierre Morin’s “Considering the Revolution: The Identities Created by the American Revolutionary War,” in the February 2023 issue). The articles build upon the public plenaries of the annual meetings in 2021 and 2022 of the National Council on Public History (NCPH), co-hosted by the National Park Service (NPS) and NCPH. These conversations will, as Morin writes, “contribute to larger discussions during NPS’s commemorations of the American Revolution’s 250th anniversary about its changing interpretation and its continuing relevance to the American people.”
The current installment, “The Rhetoric of Freedom: Remembering Slavery during the Semiquincentennial of the American Revolution” by Sylvea Hollis, in her words, “focuses on the rhetoric of freedom during the age of the American Revolution. It examines the question of how to commemorate war and independence while simultaneously remembering the pervasiveness of chattel slavery.” Hollis, associate professor of African and African American History at Montgomery College, convened four historians, two who work in universities, and two who work at historic sites, to discuss the centrality of slavery in what would become the United States in the Revolutionary War era and how public historians can effectively interpret the complexity of the interplay between slavery and freedom during and after the war. Hollis argues that the most meaningful public engagement emphasizes process along with product, allowing visitors to understand how historians construct knowledge of the past. She ends by spotlighting the Aiken-Rhett House, an urban plantation mansion in Charleston, South Carolina, as an example of the kind of best practices that she and other panelists hope to see more often.
In the next piece, “Commemorating in Place: Reflections on the Meaning and Experience of Holocaust Tourism,” Joanna Auerbach grounds a very personal experience of traveling to Holocaust sites in Germany and Poland in theoretical frameworks of memory, landscape, and tourism. By forefronting the personal, the experiential, and the physical, Auerbach pushes back against the paradigm of “dark tourism” to argue that being present in spaces of violence allowed her, as a descendant of camp survivors, a process of “contemplation and commemoration.” Yet strikingly, she finds evidence of the Holocaust, especially in Poland, most tangibly in absence—the “Jewish nonpresence” evident in Polish cities. We intend to publish more personal, reflective essays such as Auerbach’s in the future.
As public historians continue to push boundaries of historical scholarship and dissemination, the issue includes two articles exploring the possibilities of new media. The first, Benjamin Jenkins’s “Recasting Uncle Billy: r/ShermanPosting, Digital History, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in the Twenty-First Century,” demonstrates the specific ways in which users of Reddit engage with Civil War history and contemporary life as a way of engaging the public with history. Focusing on the subreddit r/ShermanPosting, Jenkins argues that users “recast” or reimagine United States General William Tecumseh Sherman as a “a champion of American diversity in the twenty-first century and a staunch opponent of the divisive political rhetoric that has taken hold among radical right-wing groups.” Recognizing that the historical Sherman had a more complex legacy than this implies, Jenkins nonetheless maintains that by posting about, arguing about, and discussing Sherman, the Civil War, and the Lost Cause, redditors engage in complex conversations to draw meaning from the past.
Next, one of the issue’s two Reports from the Field discusses the possibilities of video games as public history. Darren Reid, in “Video Game Development as Public History: Practical Reflections on Making a Video Game for Historical Public Engagement” provides historians practical advice for how to develop historically sophisticated video games. Drawing on work he did in creating a video game, Ab Uno Sanguine, based on his dissertation research, Reid argues that even with no experience and no budget, “historians can combine the wealth of available scholarship on game design with modern indie game development tools to harness the video game medium as a method of public history.” His practical, step-by-step advice should inspire many readers.
We conclude with a second Report from the Field by Idaho State Historian HannaLore Hein, “Informing Policy and Responding to Crisis: The Making of ‘Idaho’s Response to the 1918 Influenza Pandemic—ISHS Briefing Paper No.1.’” Hein wrote the briefing paper, which won the National Council for Public History’s Michael C. Robinson Award for excellence in consulting in 2020, in response to Idaho Governor Brad Little’s request for information on the state’s response to the flu pandemic of 1918 to help create his state’s response to COVID-19. The report examines “what can happen when historical context can be developed quickly enough to inform public policy decisions in response to a crisis.” We include the briefing paper as well, for reference for readers of the report and as a piece of exemplary gray literature.
Finally, we thank our departing editorial board members, Rebecca Bush, Patrick Grossi, Lynn Kronzek, Gregory Martin, Kyle T. Mays, and Harvee White. Please join me in welcoming new members Michelle Magalong, Angela Sirna, and Stephen Vider.
~Sarah H. Case, the editor of The Public Historian, earned her MA and Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is a continuing lecturer in history, teaching courses in public history, women’s history, and history of the South. She is the author of Leaders of Their Race: Educating Black and White Women in the New South (Illinois, 2017) and articles on women and education, reform, and commemoration.
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]]>In the Spring of 2023 public historians gathered—in person for the first time in four years—for our annual meeting in Atlanta. Months later, as I organized my photographs from the trip, I kept coming back to a series of images from the exhibit hall, images of a puzzle slowly coming together, one piece at a time. As so many of us consider attending NCPH and Utah Historical Society’s joint Annual Meeting from April 10-13, 2024 in Salt Lake City, look no further than what we experienced in Atlanta, Georgia for reasons that this year’s meeting can bring value to the work we do across the world.
With a little distance, I channeled my inner Priya Parker (author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters) to consider how, just like the puzzle, the NCPH 2023 conference organizers built an event that fit our needs as attendees in this time and place.
From the start, the trio of 2023 conference chairs, Marla Miller, Tara White, and Lacey Wilson, were the perfect hosts, giving us a theme with a solid and clear foundation, “To Be Determined,” which set an intention for our gathering right from the start. In describing the focus for the conference, Miller, White, and Wilson asked us to come with a sense of determination despite the past four years, while also recognizing that as a field what comes next is something we still need to determine. The theme stated, “taking a page from the unconference tradition [a flexible conference format, often designed by attendees] the 2023 theme acknowledges the open-endedness of this moment—for our communities, for our organization and our field—as we reset both the annual meeting and the direction of public history.”
With that in mind, here are four things that made NCPH 2023 a successful gathering for me:
It asked us to be bold, to be brave, and—yes—to be determined.
That sense of determination is something we can all carry as we consider the theme for the 2024 NCPH and Utah Historical Society annual meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, “Historical Urgency”. This year’s program sets forth the following questions: “What constitutes an urgent historical need? What is the difference between historical urgency and a historical emergency? How have people in the past responded to urgent matters, and what can we learn from them? How do we prioritize our work when everything we do feels urgently pressing?”
At NCPH-UHS 2024, sessions will provide approaches and opportunities for explorations bringing us together, once again, as a community to consider the ramifications of our practice as public historians, out in the world. In this way, the slow construction of the puzzle that is our work in the here and now, continues.
~Priya Chhaya is the associate director of content at the National Trust for Historic Preservation and on the board of the National Council on Public History.
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]]>The post Chicago Murals Celebrating Women: Fighting Erasure and Marginalization through Public Art appeared first on National Council on Public History.
]]>Meanwhile, the vast majority of highly visible artwork depicts White men even though they are only thirty percent of the population. According to a study by Monument Lab, which defines a monument as a “statement of power and presence in public,” the majority of sculptures, plaques, and public artworks depict White male military leaders, wealthy land owners, or racial oppressors.
Chicago Monuments Project has identified several dozen of its 500 public art pieces as problematic when it comes to the skewing of history. Not only are people who worked for peace rarely depicted, but women and people of color represent only a small percentage of the images in public spaces.
Despite the strides that women have made in political, business, judicial, and other forms of leadership on local and national levels, when it comes to public artwork, the majority find depiction in the form of a goddess, fictional characters, or generic or composite figures.
Before 2017, there were no significant depictions of real historical women in downtown Chicago in the form of public art. Kerry James Marshall changed that when he created a large-scale mural with images of twenty real women. Three years later in 2020, six activists formed the Chicago Womxn’s Suffrage Tribute Committee (CWSTC), working with the Wabash Arts Corridor to create murals that feature a racially diverse group of local suffragists and connect their work to achievements of today’s women.
CWSTC commissioned artist Diosa (Jasmina Cazacu) to create a large-scale mural for a highly-visible and highly-trafficked downtown area to add to the small number of female images in the city’s public spaces. In 2021, they installed the seven-story mural On the Wings of Change featuring portraits of ten local suffrage leaders, three of whom were African American.
They also commissioned a second text-based mural, Speak Up!, created by Dorian Sylvain, which responded to the phrase, “I’m speaking…”–a statement made repeatedly by Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2020 vice presidential debate. Their vision was to position the two murals perpendicular to each other, and to connect the passage the 19th Amendment in 1920 to Harris’s election exactly one hundred years later.
The artwork was meant to add representation of real women in the central part of Chicago. However, the opportunity to add gender equity was met with resistance by the White male owner of the parking lot adjacent to the wall. He refused to rent the parking spaces where the lifts that would be used to install the mural needed to be placed. Committee members and project stakeholders made numerous efforts to help him see how the artwork would be an additive feature to the area. But he was unrelenting in his obstinance and single-handedly stopped the installation of artwork commissioned by six women to document a woman’s history-making achievement.
This serves as an example of how challenging it is to address White male domination of public space. In some cases, the resistance and interference continue after work has been installed. For example: two murals in Chicago of beloved Black male musicians Frankie Knuckles and Juice WRLD were painted over, Black Lives Matter murals in several cities have been defaced, and a Black history mural at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as a Black Panthers mural in Los Angeles, CA have also recently seen defacement. Some historical markers that celebrate African Americans, including Jackie Robinson, have even been riddled with bullets. The Emmett Till marker in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi has been vandalized and shot at so many times that a bulletproof version had to be installed in 2019.
Despite the increasing hostility toward women and marginalized groups, CWSTC members were determined to complete their project. Once it had become apparent that it would take extraordinary effort to gain access to the original site, they refocused their energy and lobbied for alternate sites. Two years later, they secured a different, smaller wall in close proximity to their first choice, and the artist agreed to revise her design to suit the location. The committee decided to fill the remaining space by commissioning a third mural, Votes for Women by AB Productions, which features the yellow rose and titular phrase, a slogan used during the suffrage movement. In order to ensure that the two new murals complemented On the Wings of Change, a similar color scheme was chosen incorporating purple, yellow, and white–popular colors of the suffrage movement. The result is a deliberate nod to that history as well as purposeful continuity between all three pieces that serve as a set.
Today, when people are in the South Loop walking north from 700 South Wabash, they will see all three south-facing murals in close proximity: Speak Up! and Votes for Women on the east side of the street, and On the Wings of Change on the west side just a few yards away. The three murals work together to construct a narrative of the suffrage movement.
Importantly, the completion of these large-scale projects demonstrates how resistance to the representation of African American women in public spaces will be met with equal determination to make them seen. The murals say that Chicago-based activist women–both past and present–are speaking.
~Michelle Duster is an educator and activist whose advocacy has led to street names, monuments, historical markers, and other public history projects. She is a member of CWSTC and the author of several books, including Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells (2021) and Ida B. Wells, Voice of Truth (2022) which are about her paternal great-grandmother.
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