Editor’s corner: collaboration and belonging

07 November 2024 – Sarah H. Case

Editors’ Note: We publish the editor’s introduction to the November 2024 issue of The Public Historian here. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members and others with subscription access.

On the cover: Members of the San Francisco, California,  chapter of the National Council of Negro Women holding signs supporting voter registration. September 8, 1956. Please see the discussion of voting rights, voter suppression, and citizenship, in “Considering the Revolution: Citizenship and Sovereignty.”  Photograph credit: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Frances Albrier Collection. Used by permission

This issue begins with a unique take on the National Council on Public History (NCPH) presidential address, presented at the March 2024 Annual Meeting (held jointly with the Utah Historical Society) in Salt Lake City, Utah. Rather than give a traditional speech, Kristine Navarro-McElhaney hosted a conversation among women, who, like her, are “women of color who have been the ‘first’ in their respective public history roles,” in her case, the first person of color to serve as NCPH president.

The discussants—Amber N. Mitchell (founding Curator of Black History at The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Detroit, Michigan); Lacey Wilson (Project Manager of the Teen Museum Studies program of the Underground Railroad Education Center in Albany, New York); and Nicole Martinez-LeGrand (Curator of Multicultural Collections at the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis)—dove into a conversation about the “difficulties and rewards of taking on these leadership positions” as the first, and sometimes only, women of color in their organizations. This issue includes an edited version of their discussion, touching on how to self-advocate; the importance of mentorship and community; and the need to fairly compensate similarly pioneering staff. The format and themes of the discussion serve as a worthy tribute to Kristine’s innovative, inclusive, and generous approach to her tenure as NCPH president.

In addition, this issue brings the fourth installment of our series, “Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution.” (See Part 1, “Considering the Revolution: Indigenous Histories and Memory in Alaska, Hawai‘i, and the Indigenous Plateau,” by Laurie Arnold and Miki‘ala Ayau Pescaia, as well as Amy Lonetree’s “Decolonizing Museums, Memorials, and Monuments,” in the November 2021 issue; Part 2, Jean-Pierre Morin’s “Considering the Revolution: The Identities Created by the American Revolutionary War,” in the February 2023 issue; and Part 3, “The Rhetoric of Freedom: Remembering Slavery during the Semiquincentennial of the American Revolution,” by Sylvea Hollis in the February 2024 issue). The articles build upon the public plenaries held since 2020 at the NCPH Annual Meeting co-hosted by the National Park Service (NPS) and NCPH. 

The current installment, Greg Smoak’s “Considering the Revolution: Citizenship and Sovereignty,” is drawn from the opening public plenary also held at the 2024 NCPH Annual Meeting. Smoak served as convening scholar for a group that included Kristen Hayashi (Director of Collections Management & Access and Curator at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles), Katherine Kitterman (Utah Historical Society); Nicole Moore (Director of Education at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta), and Yvette Towersap (a citizen of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation, Idaho who has worked in tribal government for over two decades). The conversation explored the evolving meaning of citizenship and its relationship to sovereignty over the course of US history, considering the limitations, constraints, and outright denial of citizenship that some Americans have experienced (and continue to experience). As Smoak writes, “Over the past two and a half centuries, the intertwined concepts of citizenship and sovereignty have remained among the most critical and contested legacies of the Revolution.”

Next in this issue is Laura A. Miller and Angela Sirna’s “Researching the Job Corps at Acadia National Park,” a reflection on the process of co-authoring the NPS Historic Resource Study, “An Island Apart”: The Job Corps at Acadia National Park, 1966–1969.  The history of the Job Corps at Acadia National Park in Maine is detailed in the study; in the article, Miller and Sirna explore how their work can be used to “demonstrate the contemporary relevance of this history for both the National Park Service and federal youth conservation programming.” The authors argue that policymakers and grassroots organizations that call for a Civilian Climate Corps, based on the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps, would benefit from a careful study of the legacy of the Job Corps, part of the Great Society of the 1960s. They urge us to consider what we can learn “from the federal government and the National Park Service’s efforts to bring poor young men, mostly young men of color, into largely white communities outside national parks to work on conservation projects in the mid-1960s,” showing how an understanding of the successes and limitation of this program could shape a more successful initiative today.  

Next, we feature a Report from the Field, “The AIDS Memorial Quilt as Radical Public History,” co-authored by Michaela Howells, Jennifer Le Zotte, LeShonda Wallace, Edward Adams, Jeffrey Mills, and Isabelle Nechvatal. Using the framework of “radical public history,” the authors recount how academics, students, and community members together created educational programming based on panels of the AIDS quilt. Displays of panels of the Quilt, along with interpretative signage and classroom materials, allowed students at the University of North Carolina Wilmington a better understanding of the toll that the AIDS pandemic has had and continues to have, especially for minority communities in the Southeast. A follow-up questionnaire affirmed that students gained an enhanced understanding about the history and ongoing danger of the AIDS pandemic. 

This issue also features a robust review section, with three review essays, two of which tackle nontraditional forms of public history—theater and social media. Finally, we offer our first ever review of a Disneyland ride.

~Sarah H. Case, the editor of The Public Historian, earned her MA and Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is a continuing lecturer in history, teaching courses in public history, women’s history, and history of the South. She is the author of Leaders of Their Race: Educating Black and White Women in the New South (Illinois, 2017) and articles on women and education, reform, and commemoration.