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  • Lessons in interpreting controversial history at a Southern heritage site

    Part of what drew me to the University of South Carolina’s Ph.D. program in history in 2010 was the opportunity to engage with controversial topics while pursuing an M.A. in public history along the way. The summer after my first year in the program, I found a part-time job with a private non-profit organization looking […]

  • National Heritage Areas: worth preserving and promoting

    Quick – name three National Park Service (NPS) units that commemorate, mark or otherwise emphasize the history of industrial work, or the labor movement in the United States. Okay – Lowell National Historical Park might come to mind. Anywhere else? Think. Pretty hard, isn’t it? That is because there are not that many: Keweenaw National […]

  • Mass collaboration and historical synthesis in “The American Yawp”

    The American Yawp, the profession’s first multi-authored open textbook, contains thirty chapters and almost 300,000 words. It covers everything from indigenous creation stories to Instagram. How, with historical input accelerating and the scope of scholarship expanding, could any individual or small group of historians hope to capture the breadth of American history and to do […]

  • Project Showcase: Prisons Today

    Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site recently launched Prisons Today: Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration, the first major museum exhibit to tackle this civil rights issue.* Prisons Today asks open-ended questions and encourages dialogue among visitors about America’s past and present prison systems. 

  • Public history and public activism at work: Washington’s McMillan Sand Filtration Site

    On July 4, about 60 people attended a party thrown by Washington, DC activists trying to save a historic water filtration plant. The event was held in a row house in the city’s gentrifying Bloomingdale neighborhood, which I wrote about in a recent History@Work post. That post garnered me an invitation to the July gathering, […]

  • We need public histories of organized labor

    Two thousand and twelve was another wrenching year for American workers and labor unions. The time seems right for public historians to recover organized labor’s past and to place that history at the center of our current public policy debates. What kind of year was it for workers?  The economic “recovery” has been tepid, and […]

  • The happy historian (Part 2): Degrees of history

    Continued from Part I. I recently watched a documentary on, of all things, happiness. The film, “Happy,” focused on the study of happiness (positive psychology) and what makes people happy and when, along with the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that contribute or detract from happiness. One assertion is that being connected to a community or […]

  • The Ruskin College records: Destroying a radical past

    In the course of moving Ruskin College, the trade union and labour movement college founded in central Oxford in 1899, from its prime location to a site on the outskirts of the city, the college has been re-branded and much of its archive destroyed or dispersed to other institutions. Most importantly, thousands of historic student […]

  • NCPH Book Award: Reflections from Susan Ferentinos

    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 […]

  • The public history of the Flint water crisis (Part 2)

        A personal perspective on the Flint water crisis My thoughts on the Flint water crisis stem from a personal perspective, as well as my academic interests in deindustrialization, African American history, and heritage tourism. When I was two years old, my dad was offered a job as a reference librarian at the University […]