Tag Archive
07 December 2023 – Perri Meldon
The National Park Service (NPS) has no official mandate to interpret the lives of people with disabilities across the park system. To address this lack, the NPS Park History Program is creating the Disability History Handbook, a multi-authored anthology slated for publication in late 2024. Read More
02 November 2023 – Catherine Stiers
Shortly after ChatGPT was released to the public in late 2022, the debate started about whether or not it meant the end of public history as we know it. Is the public historian obsolete when computers can tell you anything you want to know about the past? Read More
17 November 2022 – Allena Berry and Suzanne Fischer 1
What exactly defines a home front? With that question, the U.S. World War II Home Front working group began our first meeting. Very few visitors to WWII sites in the United States, especially those who come from non-white communities, see their history as home front history. Read More
02 August 2022 – Sarah H. Case
advocacy, interpretation, The Public Historian, slavery, historic preservation, commemoration, historic house museums
Editors’ Note: We publish the editor’s introduction to the August 2022 issue of The Public Historian here. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members and to others with subscription access. Read More
15 March 2022 – Maria DiBenigno and Jajuan Johnson
public engagement, community history, digital history, interpretation, collaboration, museums, African American history, campus history, social justice
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
16 March 2021 – Perri Meldon 1
For nearly four years, I have collaborated with the National Park Service to embrace the culture and history of people with disabilities represented by its 400+ parks, historic sites, monuments, and battlefields. During my summer 2020 internship with the NPS, I contributed to this effort by writing an annotated bibliography on American disability history. Read More
03 March 2021 – Doris Morgan Rueda 3
Art was how I first encountered and understood history. Today, as a doctoral candidate researching the transnational legal history of juvenile justice in the American borderlands, I explore the history of the surveillance and policing of youth in places such as public schools, places of worship, and social services through historical visual sources and my own multi-media art. Read More
29 December 2020 – Mary Biggs
Editors Note: How do historical sites reckon with landscape within interpretive plans? Mary Biggs joins us to explore how one former plantation space in North Carolina uses the landscape on which formally enslaved people worked and lived to reconceptualize visitor experience at that site. Read More
12 May 2020 – Noah Janis
interpretation, race, slavery, historic preservation, commemoration, African American history, public engagement, plantation, community history, North Carolina
A big house. Stately trees. Curious outbuildings. In 1905, Pennsylvania-born tourist Matilda Kessinger marveled at the landscape before her, “something one always reads about but never sees.” After 18 years of traveling the South, Kessinger had finally found the one place that lived up to her romantic ideals of an antebellum plantation. Read More
03 December 2019 – Anita Bakshi
advocacy, Native American, methods, Indigenous People, social justice, environmental history, public engagement, memory, food, sense of place, interpretation
Editor’s note: this is the second in a two-part series. Part 1 was published on November 28, 2019.
I first visited Ringwood, New Jersey, in February of 2018 with a group of fifteen students enrolled in my design studio class at Rutgers University’s department of landscape architecture. Read More