Editor’s Corner: Reflecting on the Semiquincentennial

12 February 2026 – Sarah H. Case

Cover of the February 2026 issue of The Public Historian

This year marks the Semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, an event that announced a new nation in formation and triggered global, far-reaching consequences. Since 2021, the National Council on Public History (NCPH) and the National Park Service (NPS) have co-sponsored plenaries at the NCPH annual meeting to discuss the long and complex legacy of the quest for independence. These offered multiple perspectives to enrich and broaden interpretation of the 250th, especially for those (within and outside of NPS) engaged in programming anticipating the commemoration. Additionally, edited versions of the plenaries, conceived as a series titled “Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution,” have appeared in The Public Historian and will again appear in a collection published by NPS. The first four of these were: Laurie Arnold and Miki‘ala Ayau Pescaia, “Considering the Revolution: Indigenous Histories and Memory in Alaska, Hawai‘i, and the Indigenous Plateau,” and Amy Lonetree, “Decolonizing Museums, Memorials, and Monuments” (November 2021); Jean-Pierre Morin, “Considering the Revolution: The Identities Created by the American Revolutionary War” (February 2023); Sylvea Hollis, “The Rhetoric of Freedom: Remembering Slavery during the Semiquincentennial of the American Revolution” (February 2024); and Gregory E. Smoak, “Considering the Revolution: Citizenship and Sovereignty” (November 2024).

The fifth installment, by M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, the series editor of Commemorating the 250th, headlines the current issue. Rymsza-Pawlowska’s “‘Play the Long Game’: Public Historians Approach the Semiquincentennial and Beyond,” draws on a virtual roundtable held in June 2025 that featured four previous panelists, Ista Clarke, Sylvea Hollis, Nicole Moore, and Kristen Hayashi. The tone of the plenary discussion, and of the article, is strikingly different from the first four. As Rymsza-Pawlowska writes, since January 2025, “it started to become increasingly apparent that the Semiquincentennial envisioned by the previous panels—as well as the very public history institutions and federal funders, including humanities councils and the Park Service itself, that would support and articulate the commemoration—were under existential threat.” As a result, the conversation explored changing expectations, limitations, loss of funding, and other consequences of the President Donald J. Trump administration’s assault on our core public history institutions. Rymsza-Pawlowska rightfully notes that it is not only an attack on “history,” but also an attack on “historians” and the work that we do to broaden and deepen knowledge about the origins of our nation, its successes, and its shortcomings. Despite the very real obstacles, panelists ended with an affirmation of commitment to open inquiry, representation, and resistance.

Our other three articles are Reports from the Field. The first, by archivists Michelle Caswell, Anna Robinson-Sweet, and Sadaf Maleki, examines how the use of Zoom and similar technologies might change the process of conducting oral histories. Focusing on two community archives, After Violence Project (AVP) and South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), they consider that although some interviewees found online interviews impersonal and somewhat awkward, many oral history narrators actually found that the technology allowed what they labeled “productive emotional distance” between narrator and interviewer. These interviewees found they could open up about traumatic and difficult subjects more easily because they were not face to face with the interviewer. Mindful of the surveillance potential of Zoom, the authors nevertheless argue that it might provide a tool that could create “psychologically safer experiences for vulnerable people, producing more honest and detailed life stories.”

The issue also brings two Reports from the Field that examine best practices to engage undergraduates with public history scholarship. In “Taking History Beyond the Classroom: Embedding Public History and Shared Authority into the University Degree,” Darcy Campbell and Michael A. McDonnell discuss a class that McDonnell helped create and Campbell enrolled in at the University of Sydney in 2015. By stressing the needs of organizations, they helped craft a “community-engaged public history course for senior undergraduates that truly teaches students to share authority with partner organizations to create a lasting and consequential public history project.” Rather than focused on serving the needs of the students, the course emphasized that students should serve the needs of the partners, including nonprofits in Sydney, and in some cases, students’ small hometowns. “In essence,” they wrote, “our students have to do the work of a practicing public historian.” The course also helped them reimagine how they might use historical thinking and a history background in a wide range of career paths. As the course evolves, it continues to emphasize collaborative, practical, and productive work that enriches students and aids community organizations.

The final article, “Campus-Based Digital Approaches to Making Visible the Hispanic Past and Latino Present of North Florida,” by Constanza López Baquero, Clayton McCarl, Johanna Asencio-Morcillo, Paola Ramos Maysonet, and Alondra Solares Rodríguez, also considers undergraduate training in public history. The authors are professors (Baquero and McCarl) and (now former) students at the University of North Florida engaged in two public history projects, Voces y Caras: Latinx Communities of North Florida and the Florida Series of the digital editing workshop coloniaLab. Student participants in these projects edit documents and conduct oral histories which are later published online. Through this work, they learn both practical public history skills and information about the Spanish and Latino past and present of Florida. The article includes students’ reflections on their participation in these projects.

Finally, I’d like to thank outgoing editorial board member Hilary Green for her six years of service, and welcome our new members, Richard Anderson, Daisy Ocampo Diaz, Cheryl Jimenez Frei, and Kristen Hayashi.

~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.