Editor’s Corner: new media and stone walls

03 March 2025 – Sarah H. Case

Editors’ Note: We publish the editor’s introduction to the February 2025 issue of The Public Historian here. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members and others with subscription access.

This issue presents four articles that demonstrate the diversity of public history scholarship today. Labor issues, racial justice, new media, and the intersection of the built and natural environment are considered in these pages. 

Cover image of Volume 47, Number 1, February 2025 of “The Public Historian.”

In “Renting History: Housing and Labor on Public History’s Front Lines,” Brian Whetstone takes a close look at the practice of house museums and historical societies renting their property to tenants, many of whom acted as both caretakers and interpreters. Focusing primarily on the mid-twentieth century Northeast, Whetstone shows that this practice not only sustained these institutions, but further, argues that “renting and tenant labor were vital to the interpretive, labor, and curatorial practices of house museums throughout the twentieth century.” Although often overlooked by both visitors and public history scholarship, “renting history” sustained and shaped public history institutions. Further, Whetstone shows that this phenomenon “makes explicit an uncomfortable reality: the practice of public history is inextricably entangled with the logics of real estate, finance, and capitalism.” 

Cheryl X. Dong examines the use of public history by the Black Panther Party (BPP)—a radically anti-capitalist political organization that critiqued both US history and the tactics employed in the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement through their newspaper. Dong finds that the BPP newspaper, The Black Panther Community News Service, “engaged in active public history labor as it recast the Black past and US history to support the party’s . . . ideological rejection of nonviolent protest and critique of middle-class Black political respectability.” The BPP actively undertook historical research and interpretation, and in doing so “helped establish a theoretical framework for social justice-oriented public history as an alternative narrative that did not emerge from white, mainstream institutions such as museums or historical societies.” Dong argues the BPP provides an example which professional public historians should heed: “marginalized groups [are] the keepers of their own history rather than . . . disadvantaged communities that need history experts” to record and tell their stories. This article encourages public historians to revise their understanding of best practices in public history methodology.

Next, we feature two reports from the field. Anja Werner, in “Motion Comics as Digital Public History: A New Means to Attain Multi-Perspectivity in Contested and Entangled Histories,” examines a new kind of media for public history, motion comics. Motion comics are short (often under ten minutes) videos based on drawings with either a narrating voice or sound effects or both. Used more commonly for public health campaigns, Werner finds that they can enliven a classroom and especially online teaching. Werner makes the case that these short videos create public history engagement on several levels, for the historians-as-producers, for the subjects (who often contribute oral histories), and for audiences. Werner argues that these short films create an especially strong emotional connection for both producers and audiences, as the subjectivity of their drawings (comics) allows them to seem both personal and universal. 

In “Conserving the Historic Stone Walls of New England,” Robert Thorson focuses on New England’s ubiquitous stone walls, the interpretation of which “provides new opportunities to thread together historical, archaeological, aesthetic, geological, and ecological interests.” These structures, Thorson argues, “have become dominant portals through which residents and tourists experience early American history in the Northeast, especially New England.” Using a multi-step approach, Thorson shows how preservation and interpretation of these walls can provide a rich resource for public historians. 

We continue to explore social media as a place for public history production in Felipe Caro Romero’s review essay, “Virtual Tools for IRL Problems: Reviewing the Construction of Queer History Online.” Caro examines seven Instagram pages, in both English and Spanish that document and analyze the queer past. As he states, the “sharing of queer history on the internet is an important intervention against its censorship elsewhere.”

Finally, please join me in thanking for their service outgoing editorial board members Paige Roberts, Samantha Rosenthal, and Kendall Tallmadge Tryhane, and in welcoming our new members, Bethanee Bemis, Evan Faulkenbury, Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, and Tara Y. White.

~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.