Another invitation: Teaching public history with TPH

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The Public Historian

The Public Historian

Public history education is exploding, with new graduate and undergraduate programs appearing every year–or so it seems. The National Council on Public History has long supported the professionalization of public history education by developing best practices documents for public history programs and other resources for educators. The NCPH has also long promoted public history scholarship, most notably with its journal, The Public Historian, which publishes the results of research and case studies and addresses the broad substantive and theoretical issues in the field.

At the very heart of the university is the conviction that scholarship and teaching go hand in hand, that each enriches the other. So we would like to know how the articles published in TPH have influenced public history teaching. We would like to ask those of you who are educators to tell us which articles you have used in your classrooms. Do you regularly turn to TPH when designing a syllabus? Are there particular articles you come back to again and again either because they provide excellent case studies or prompt theoretical discussion? Which articles have best sparked student interest and engagement?

We would like to compile a list of such articles that can be widely shared through the NCPH website, so that we can learn from each other. We will then ask some of you to write blog posts about these articles and how you have incorporated them into your teaching. We will publish these posts, along with links to the articles nominated, on History@Work next year. And we will also compile them into an e-publication (both PDF and EPUB format), available on this site, for future reference and use.

So, as you begin the spring (or winter) term, think about the TPH articles you have used to teach public history, about what has worked well, and what has not, and tell us how you have successfully incorporated the scholarship published in TPH into your teaching. A side benefit will be that we, the editors of TPH, will get a glimpse at how the journal has been of service to public history education. It may influence what we decide to publish in the future! After all, we are public historians who want to work with our audience.

Nominations can be made in the comment section below, but because I also want to know who you are and how to contact you, please send your proposals to me, Tammy Gaskell, co-editor, The Public Historian, at [email protected]. The deadline for nominations is March 15, 2017.

~ Tammy Gaskell is the public historian in residence at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities at Rutgers University–Camden and co-editor of The Public Historian.

1 comment
  1. Amy Tyson says:

    Edward T. O’Donnel, “Pictures vs. Words? Public History, Tolerance, and the Challenge of Jacob Riis,” in The Public Historian Vol. 26, No. 3 (Summer 2004), pp. 7-26 ; Karamanski, Theodore J. 2010. History, Memory, and Historic Districts in Chicago. The Public Historian 32(4): 33-41; Roger B. Stein, “Visualizing Conflict in The West as America,” in The Public Historian (Volume 14, No. 3, Summer 1992), 85-91.; Robert Weyeneth, “History, he wrote: Murder, politics, and the challenges of public history in a community with a secret,” The Public Historian, 16(2), 51-73.; Sandra Taylor, “A More Perfect Union,” The Public Historian, 10: 3 (Summer, 1988).; Azie Dungey and Amy Tyson, “‘Ask a Slave’ interview” from The Public Historian

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