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  • Leapfrogging over politics with a mobile historical app?

    The Southern landscape and many other parts of the United States remain pockmarked with state historical markers that demand reinterpretation or removal.  One state historical marker noting the failure of New Orleans’ 17th Street Canal in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina demonstrates that Louisiana has landed on the right side of this history.  Efforts to […]

  • Still grinding? How the pandemic is accelerating job precarity in public history

    Job precarity has become a defining feature of the public history field in recent years as workers grind through extractive cycles of unstable, part-time, and temporary work. A 2017 survey on Public History Education and Employment compiled by NCPH, AASLH, AHA, and OAH reported that “respondents noted that contract work has become more common, permanent […]

  • Project Showcase: At Home in Holland

    “At Home in Holland,” a new digital history project by students at the University of Amsterdam, responds to the way that hostile reactions to immigrants have undermined the traditional idea of Dutch tolerance and hospitality in recent years. The current Dutch asylum policy was developed in the 1980s. In that same period, Amnesty International Netherlands […]

  • A Public Historian in Publishing: Lessons from Working Outside the Field

    As we grapple with the short-term (and potentially long-term) impacts of the COVID-19 health crisis on museums and cultural institutions, public historians across the field are dealing with layoffs, staff reductions, and decreased funding. And when non-history job prospects arise, offering higher salaries, healthcare benefits, and the ability to work from home, many face a […]

  • Book clubs as public history

    On the evening of November 12, 2020, during a live Zoom call with seven other people, I spoke rapidly about history, excitedly displayed some photographs, and waved my arms around. That’s my usual teaching demeanor—whether in person or online—but I wasn’t teaching undergrads. I was participating in my local book club.

  • Collective bargaining during a pandemic: observations from the Tenement Museum Union

    Editors’ Note: For more on labor relations at the Tenement Museum, check out the forthcoming May 2021 issue of The Public Historian. In recent years, the number of unionized workers within the nonprofit sector of the U.S. economy has grown steadily. At cultural institutions that have remained open during Covid-19, the pandemic has given urgency […]

  • In support of a National Museum of the American Latino at the Smithsonian

      On December 21, 2020, as part of the omnibus spending bill, Congress approved a National Museum of the American Latino (along with a Smithsonian Women’s History Museum).[1] This approval came after a previous effort was blocked by Senator Mike Lee of Utah who argued that such efforts to create new museums were divisive and […]

  • How should we respond when a public historian engages in, or has experienced, sexual harassment?

    Over the past several years, many of us have participated in conversations about the prevalence of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the public history field. This behavior has occurred at conferences, in workplaces, and in educational settings, among consultants, audiences, frontline workers, students, and others. How should we, as a public history community, respond?

  • Making Public History More Accessible During Times of Uncertainty

    The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 is as good a time as ever for every museum and historic site to devise strategies to make public history more accessible. For public historians—as with many other industries related to travel and tourism—this year has been filled with chaos, uncertainty, prolonged furloughs, and unemployment. Current graduate students find themselves […]

  • A women’s history museum without women’s historians

    On May 7, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill authorizing the creation of a commission to explore the feasibility of establishing a women’s history museum on the National Mall. Yet many women’s historians and museum professionals are not celebrating. Why not? Because this bill (H.R. 863) carves out a special role for the […]