Editors’ Note: This is one of two posts reflecting on a working group that met at the 2019 National Council on Public History Annual Meeting in Hartford, Connecticut.
In his 1957 book Interpreting Our Heritage, Freeman Tilden attempted to provide one of the first working definitions of what it means to interpret history and nature to public audiences. Read More
For the 2019 National Council on Public History Annual Meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, I had the pleasure of coordinating theInterpreting Our Heritage in the 21st Century working group with public historian Nick Sacco. Our goal was to take a fresh look at Freeman Tilden’s foundational text, Interpreting Our Heritage (1957), and to consider whether it required “repair work,” which was the annual meeting’s theme.Read More
Like many of my friends and colleagues, I’ve been reflecting on the work of journalist Tony Horwitz, who died suddenly on May 27th. Horwitz’s 1998 book, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, had a profound impact on American popular culture, public history, and on my own personal and professional life. Read More
Every week throughout the summer, small groups of residents of Missoula, Montana, meet at Caras Park near downtown for history tours called “Unseen Missoula.” One important contributor to the development of the tour program has been the public history students of the University of Montana. Read More
I decided to become a professional historian in a campground in Ohio in the summer of 1994. I was spending the day lounging at my campsite, reading About Time: Exploring the Gay Past, by Martin Duberman, when his essay “’Writhing Bedfellows’ in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence” got me so fired up that I decided it was time to go out and do what I could to bring the past to the people. Read More
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a special online section accompanying issue 37 (2) of The Public Historian, guest edited by Lisa Junkin Lopez, which focuses on the future of historic house museums. The contributions in this section highlight the voices of artists who engage with historic house museums as sites of research, exhibition, and social practice.Read More
Editor’s Note: The May issue of The Public Historian will explore the future of historic house museums. Historic houses are struggling to survive in the 21st century, but as Bill Adair and Laura Koloski describe, some are experimenting with strategies that are making old houses new again.
What do exhibits about Marie Antoinette’s fashion and Ayatollah Khomeini’s political action, and websites about the invention of the toilet and the dissemination of the Pentagon Papers have in common? They are all student entries in the National History Day competition that I’ve had the opportunity to review as a judge over the past seven years. Read More
Jennifer Tyburczy’s brilliant observation that all museums “have played an important but often overlooked role in the institutionalization of categories of sexual ‘normalcy’ and ‘perversity’” can also be applied to house museums and historic sites. House museums, as sites for interpreting private lives, are engaged in complex ways with presentations of sex and sexuality. Read More
One of my life goals has long been to read Don Quixote in the original Spanish, and I recently embarked on this monumental, even quixotic, task. Read More
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