Author Archive

Mary Rizzo

Launching the NCPH and AASLH survey on sexual harassment and gender discrimination in public history

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The National Council on Public History (NCPH) and the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) have launched an online survey about sexual harassment and gender discrimination in public history. This effort is the culmination of more than a year of work by members of NCPH’s Board-Led Subcommittee on Gender Discrimination and Sexual Harassment, co-chaired by Kristen Baldwin Deathridge and Mary Rizzo. Read More

The Continuing Work of the Board-led Subcommittee on Gender Discrimination and Sexual Harrasment

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Authors’ Note: As you may be aware, the status of the NCPH annual meeting has changed. The sessions will not take place as described below, but the activities of the committee continue.

As we look forward to our annual meeting in Atlanta, members of the National Council on Public History (NCPH) board-led Subcommittee on Gender Discrimination and Sexual Harassment wanted to share an update on our recent activities. Read More

Decolonizing the Digital Literary Canon through Digitizing “Chicory”

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Editor’s note: This is the second post in a three-part series on the Chicory Revitalization Project.   

In my first post in this series, I argued that Chicory, a community poetry magazine from Baltimore in the 1960s, could be a valuable resource for public historians seeking the perspectives of regular people, particularly working-class African American young people, about the tumultuous era they lived through. Read More

All Poetry to the People! Black Arts Movement Poetry as Public History

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Editor’s Note: This is the first post in a three-part series on Baltimore’s Chicory Revitalization Project. 

Following the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, black visual artists, writers, dancers, musicians, actors, and poets conceptualized themselves as part of the Black Arts Movement, a black nationalist political and aesthetic project. Read More

NCPH so white?

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2015 will be remembered by historians as the year of #BlackLivesMatter, an intersectional civil rights movement that merged direct action, political activity, and social media to force a national discussion around issues of police violence and institutional racism. It’s also pushed to the forefront discussions about diversity in various other kinds of American institutions, from Hollywood movies to Silicon Valley. Read More

All that is solid? The politics of digitization

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I’d never held a duck decoy in my hands before and certainly not one that was important enough to be in a museum’s collection. It was my first day as education curator at the Tuckerton Seaport Museum in Tuckerton, New Jersey, and along with Jackie Stewart, the director of the folklife center (it was her first day, too), I was organizing a small exhibit for the nature center. Read More

Finding the roots of civic engagement in the public humanities

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Editor’s Note: This is the third piece in a series on the “crisis” in the humanities. A post introducing the series can be found here.

When the American Academy of Arts and Sciences makes the case for federal support for the public humanities in its Heart of the Matter report, it relies on arguments about the potential for civic engagement. Read More