Author Archive
16 September 2013 – Will Walker 1
One of the biggest challenges public history educators face is managing community partnerships. Such partnerships offer rich learning experiences for both undergraduate and graduate students, but they often entail numerous complications, which may lead some students and instructors to seek to avoid them altogether. Read More
01 August 2013 – Will Walker 4
With the resignations of the Hirshhorn Museum’s director and the chairman of its board of trustees this summer, the Bubble, or Seasonal Inflatable Structure, project (at left) has collapsed in a very public way. As the Bubble deflated under the weight of its projected costs, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, a different kind of venue for arts and culture, continued its long run of phenomenal success. Read More
21 June 2013 – Will Walker 5
At the NCPH annual meeting in Ottawa, Margo Shea and Will Walker, along with other public history educators interested in online teaching and learning, began a conversation about the challenges, risks, and opportunities of having civil and productive conversations about tough questions related to public history (i.e. Read More
31 December 2012 – Will Walker
Doing public programs is never easy, but it is the most immediate and rewarding way to engage directly with your audience. This past semester, the Cooperstown Graduate Program’s oral history project experimented with a new type of public program. Taking our cue from the statewide “Community Conversations” sponsored by the New York Council for the Humanities, which also provided funding for our project, we decided to use our large archive of oral histories as the basis for a series of dialogues about important environmental topics. Read More
07 September 2012 – Will Walker
I was fortunate enough to be invited to China earlier this summer for a conference on urban planning, historic preservation, and cultural development. With so much hyperbole in the press about the “Chinese century,” I expected to be swept away by the stunning economic growth of the Asian giant. Read More
19 December 2011 – Will Walker 4
The Smithsonian is, of course, not the only institution associated with the federal government that maintains an archive about its own history. The National Park Service, for example, has made a substantial investment in documenting the histories of its parks. Read More
29 July 2011 – Will Walker
The recent reviews of Ken Burns’ National Parks film in The Public Historian got me thinking about the NPS site in my hometown, Oyster Bay, Long Island. Sagamore Hill was the home of Theodore Roosevelt for most of his adult life, and it was where he died in 1919. Read More
18 November 2010 – Will Walker 1
The editors of the online journal Common-place perhaps had Whitman’s line from the 1855 preface of Leaves of Grass: “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” in mind when they decided recently to inaugurate a column that features contemporary poetry based on historical research. Read More
20 July 2010 – Will Walker 1
Is it possible that something interesting might come from a place called Dulwich? One suspects that the people who reside in this area of South London try extra hard at dinner parties to appear lively and witty given the name of their place of residence. Read More