Collegial questioning: A new forum on history in the US National Park Service (Part 3)

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Continued from Part 1 and Part 2.

~ Christine Arato, Chief Historian, National Park Service, Northeast Region

After Imperiled Promise landed with something of a magnificent thud almost two years ago, I liken the NPS response to a progression along the five stages of grief articulated by Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. Read More

Professional opportunities Nov. 26, 2013

ANNCT: Public Interest Declassification Board seeks input about what the U.S. government should prioritize for declassification. Current topic is records 25 years or younger with more topics to follow over the next month.

ANNCT: Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts and University of Pennsylvania Libraries launch series of infographic posters on preservation terms and guidelines
Visit website for first poster, focusing on temperature and relative humidity

ANNCT: Recent and upcoming from BackStory Radio: American Oratory, Conspiracy Thinking, A History of Scandal

ANNCT: Museums, Politics and Power” blog and conversation about those issues as a lead-up to tri-national conference in St. Read More

Collegial questioning: A new forum on history in the US National Park Service (Part 2)

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Continued from Part 1

~ Seth Bruggeman, Associate Professor of History and Director, Center for Public History, Temple University

I’ve been fortunate to have had several points of contact with the Imperiled Promise report since its release, from attending early conference sessions with its authors to being a conversation facilitator myself and, most recently, speaking about where it may lead the NPS’s history program.  Read More

Collegial questioning: A new forum on history in the US National Park Service (Part 1)

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Editor’s Note:  On November 6, 2013, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers University-Camden convened a public forum to explore the changing presentation of history in US national parks.  The gathering took as its starting point the 2011 report “Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Parks,” which has sparked other similar conversations over the past year and a half (for example, this one a year ago in Boston). Read More

Reading the artifact: From inquiry to interpretation

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Continued from Part 1 and Part 2.

On the final day of Reading Artifacts Summer Institute (RASI), each group was required to present its artifact to an audience of other participants, museum staff, and volunteers. Throughout the morning, artifacts that had initially seemed ambiguous and daunting at the start of the week were slowly separated into layers of meaning and their hidden histories were recounted. Read More

A culinary school model for public history programs

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There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the number of academic public history programs, the saturation of the job market, and concern about the training students are receiving (see Robert Weyeneth’s article “A Perfect Storm”).  Curtailing the number of public history programs, growing the public history market, and accrediting programs are all big challenges. Read More

My carbon offset piggybank: Thoughts on sustainability and professional conference-going (Part 2)

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Continued from Part 1.

Purchasing carbon offsets, as most people probably know by now, involves giving a company an amount based on the carbon generated by your own activities.  The company then invests the money in projects—building renewable energy projects, reforestation, energy efficiency measures, etc.—that Read More