Tag Archive

community history

Q&A with Joseph Plaster on The Peabody Ballroom Experience, Part I

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Editors’ Note: Joseph Plaster, director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University, won the 2023 Outstanding Public History Project Award-Small Institution for the Peabody Ballroom Experience. As Plaster explains, “The Peabody Ballroom Experience is a public humanities collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and ballroom, a nearly century-old performance-based network and culture composed primarily of gay, lesbian, transgender, and gender non-conforming people of color.” Read More

Community engagement and post-custodial collecting in Central Arkansas’s Little Poland

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Community engagement has become an essential part of post-custodial collections work. Through community engagement, archives can grow trust with underrepresented groups. The Central Arkansas Library System’s (CALS) Butler Center for Arkansas Studies is currently employing these methods to document the history of the historically Polish Marche community in Pulaski County, Arkansas, while also working to build sustainable community relationships and trust. Read More

Grassroots memorialization in Atlanta, Georgia: A conversation with the leader of the Chattahoochee Brick Company Descendants Community

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Editor’s Note: On December 6, 2021, the Atlanta City Council adopted legislation to purchase the former site of the Chattahoochee Brick Company (CBC) from the Lincoln Terminal Company, a corporation specializing in fuel transportation. The site had been leased by Norfolk Southern Railway, which had abandoned plans to use the location as a train-to-truck terminal facility when a coalition of local organizations—including Groundwork Atlanta, Proctor Creek Stewardship Council, West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, Riverwalk Atlanta, and others—protested this planned use. Read More

Shared Work: William & Mary’s Highland and The Lemon Project

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William & Mary (W&M) is home to several institutes, programs, projects, and places of public history and community engagement that support the university’s mission of inclusivity and partnership.  Many of these sites partnered in W&M’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded grant, Sharing Authority to Remember and Re-Interpret the Past. Read More

Practicing heritage justice: Helping your community decide which historic places to protect from the impact of climate change (and which to let go)

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Editor’s note: Our next installment of the “Our Climate Emergency” series highlights David Glassberg’s essay about historical places, climate change, and how to decide whether a site needs to be preserved or not. 

Climate disruption makes it more urgent that public historians engage with their communities to protect places significant to local history and identity from deterioration and oblivion. Read More

Project update: Clio’s new features

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Clio is a nonprofit humanities organization that connects users to nearby history and culture through a free educational website and mobile application that hosts individual entries, tours, and trails. Clio is also designed for instructors to use in the classroom to teach the skills of doing history and to promote the work of scholars to a public audience. Read More

College on the Move Q&A: A living and public history trip through the Southeast

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Editor’s Note: How can students get valuable study abroad experience at home? John R. Legg, an Affiliate Editor with History@Work and PhD student at George Mason University, interviews Dr. Niels Eichhorn about a public history-oriented domestic study trip that introduced students to American Revolution, Civil War, and Civil Rights-era historical sites around the Southeast. Read More