Author Archive
18 May 2018 – Cathy Stanton
Editor’s note: this is the second in a series of pieces by recipients of NCPH’s 2018 best in public history awards.
On learning that I would be receiving an award for “extraordinary service” to the National Council on Public History, my initial response was to point out that the projects I’ve been involved in have always been group efforts by staff and many other NCPH members. Read More
07 September 2017 – Cathy Stanton
That’s the question that has engaged me since I first became an editor of the H-Public listserv back in 2005. As the National Council on Public History wraps up its editorial involvement in the list, this seems like a good moment to reflect on H-Public’s role in evolving discussions around the field, how the list has fit in the suite of digital platforms that NCPH has developed since 2005, and where the conversation might be headed next. Read More
01 February 2017 – Cathy Stanton
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.) Read More
28 October 2016 – Cathy Stanton 2
As I’ve watched the groundswell of protest at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota over the building of a new pipeline carrying “fracked” oil from the massive Bakken oilfield, I’ve been surprised by the lack of mention of what seems to me to be one of the most striking things about this action: the fact that it’s taking place on the same reservation where Sitting Bull was killed in December 1890 by federal Indian agency police who came to arrest him as part of an attempt to suppress a wave of Indian resistance. Read More
19 July 2016 – Cathy Stanton 5
When I studied public historians within a large U.S. national park for my dissertation research 12 years ago, I was left with some questions that I’ve been pondering ever since and that have kept coming to the surface in various ways in more recent years. Read More
05 July 2016 – Cathy Stanton
From around the field this week: Preserving audiovisual heritage and supporting public humanities projects at the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities; online and f2f workshops on collection ethics, oral history, and domestic furnishings; conference in Warsaw on museums, publics, and contested histories Read More
10 May 2016 – Cathy Stanton
From around the field this week: Soundscapes and archaeoacoustics at 2017 international conference on Malta; best practices for interpreting slavery at Guston Hall in Virginia, U.S. later this month; nominate an outstanding public historian for the AHA Herbert Feis Award by May 15. Read More
09 February 2016 – Cathy Stanton 2
If you’ve visited the website of the National Council on Public History lately, you’ll know that it’s been renovated and refreshed, with a brighter, cleaner look and (we hope) an easier-to-use design. Now it’s time for Phase II of the re-set, and since that involves the blog you’re reading—History@Work—and the space where it has lived until now—the Public History Commons—we wanted to explain what you can look for in the near future and some of the thinking that went into these changes. Read More
13 January 2016 – Cathy Stanton
As we’re preparing to move the contents of the publichistorycommons.org site into the main National Council on Public History website in the next couple of weeks, we’re making some changes to the place of the News Feed within the overall site. Read More
25 March 2015 – Cathy Stanton 2
advocacy, methods, social justice, public engagement, profession, politics, conference, ethics, Hardball History
To borrow Shakespeare’s phrase, some public history work is born political, some becomes political, and some has politics thrust upon it. Whether we intentionally locate ourselves in controversial settings, have something blow up in our faces, or encounter less spectacular kinds of resistance or misunderstanding, we’re always on the edge of the political, even when we don’t set out to be. Read More