286 Search Results Found for

  • Day of Public Humanities

    Like “public history,” “public humanities” is a concept that seems relatively straightforward but quickly proves hard to define and explain (especially when we are asked to do so by our friends and relatives).

  • NCPH 2013 Group Consulting Award (Part 2): Synergies and cross-purposes

    Editors’ Note:  This series showcases the winners of the National Council on Public History’s annual awards for the best new work in the field.  Today’s post is the second in a two-part series by Marla Miller and Anne Whisnant, two of the four authors of Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park […]

  • NCPH 2013 Group Consulting Award (Part 1): What next for Imperiled Promise?

    Editors’ Note:  This series showcases the winners of the National Council on Public History’s annual awards for the best new work in the field.  Today’s post is part of a two-part series by Marla Miller and Anne Whisnant, two of the four authors of Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service, […]

  • Project Showcase: The Health/PAC Digital Archive

    The Health/PAC Digital Archive is a complete collection of the influential Health/PAC Bulletin, which was published for nearly three decades until Health/PAC closed in 1994. Full-text searchable, it amounts to a documentary history of mid- to late-20th Century American health policy and politics. Health/PAC originated in 1967 when Robb Burlage, a co-founder of Students for […]

  • S.103 threatens digital history initiatives around race

    Not so long ago, few historians knew anything about GIS, or geographic information systems. Many of us saw little need to learn complicated software built on scripting languages and databases. We retreated to the familiar environment of the archives, leaving the technical challenges of GIS to geographers and computer scientists. This early hesitation disappeared with […]

  • Historical thinking and the place of history in public policy development

    For the past seventeen years, I have worn two hats every day that I’ve gone to work. The first one is my historian hat, as I’m the staff historian for the Canadian department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs where I research the history of the institution, prepare materials for public consumption and answer questions relating […]

  • The Women’s March on Washington: A practical resistance

      On November 9th, I put my kids on the bus and cried in the shower. I was embarrassed by my own visceral reaction to the news of the election and tried to recover for my day in the office. What I soon discovered, however, was that I was not alone in my shock, grief […]

  • Two sides of the same coin: Standing at the intersection of Hollywood and history

    Pick up a penny. On one side, we observe Lincoln as he was; on the other side, Lincoln as we have chosen to remember him. Public historians face the challenges and rewards of interpreting history for a population obsessed as much with “authenticity” as “legacy.” Films like Lincoln and Django Unchained embody both interests, and should inspire public historians […]

  • How historians work

    Historians often remark that we need to do a better job of letting others in on the ways we explore and understand the past. (That was the impetus for a thought-provoking series from The Public Historian and History@Work a couple of years ago.) In a time when “alternate facts,” outright fabrications, and diametrically opposed versions of […]

  • Letters from Chile: The working of history at six sites of memory

    Bike culture in Santiago de Chile has boomed in recent years, and today bicycles are veritable mainstays throughout the city.  The reasons are many: an uptick in Chileans’ environmental consciousness, skyrocketing public transport prices and the slashing of services,  and most importantly, according to the folks at Bicicultura, the cultural dissociation between bicycles and poverty.  […]