06 December 2013 – Katherine Garland 2
For most of my experience as a public-historian-in-training, I did not often think about the arts in any purposeful way. I played in an orchestra from elementary school through college, have a not-so-secret love for musicals (my roommates are probably tired of hearing me sing Disney songs in the shower!), Read More
02 December 2013 – David Rotenstein 1
The depression of 1893 hit the Atlanta Suburban Land Company hard. The Georgia firm, founded in 1890 to develop residential subdivisions along a new six-mile streetcar line linking downtown Atlanta with Decatur to the east, had bought nearly 2,000 acres in its first two years in business. Read More
27 November 2013 – editors
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
27 November 2013 – editors
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
25 November 2013 – editors
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
22 November 2013 – editors 2
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
20 November 2013 – RASI 2012 1
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
20 November 2013 – editors
CFP: “Innovators and Entrepreneurs: Risk Taking in Living History,” Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums 2014 Annual Meeting, June 21-25, 2014, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
DEADLINE: Dec. 1, 2013
CFP: “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Memory after the Atomic Bombings to Present” – seeking contributors for interdisciplinary anthology
DEADLINE: Dec. Read More
18 November 2013 – Aurora De Armendi 7
Editor’s Note: This piece continues a series of posts related to the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, a collaboration of public history programs across the country to raise awareness of the long history of the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay (GTMO) and foster dialogue on its future. Read More
13 November 2013 – Trevor Jones 5
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