Speaking of the survey (Part 2): What role for the NCPH journal?

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people looking through magnifying glassThis is the second in a series of posts about the findings of our summer 2012 survey on the current state and possible future directions of The Public Historian journal and other NCPH media.

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from Robert Weyeneth, National Council on Public History Board President:

A number of folks are busy analyzing the information gathered by the NCPH Readers Survey conducted this summer on the future of its journal. Read More

Mind in the marketplace (Part 5): Defining success

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fireworksWhat does it mean to be “successful” as an independent consultant? There are, in fact, many ways to succeed in this undertaking.  The answer depends on how you define “success.”

The simplest measure of all is survival.  Lots of people who try consulting aren’t able to make a go of it in the long run.   Read More

Mormons and midwives, or A tale of two shuttle rides

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I got my first sense of how present the Mormon past is in Salt Lake City on the shuttle ride from the airport to the convention center where the American Association for State and Local History conference was taking place.  The friendly woman in the seat behind me explained that she and her family were in town for the semi-annual Mormon general conference, and pointed out that you can still see the sweep of the founders’ vision in the extraordinary four- or even six-lane width of most of the major streets.  Read More

The short, intriguing career of Public History Ryan Gosling

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~ Annie Cullen and Rachel Boyle, graduate students in Public History at Loyola University Chicago, are the creators of Public History Ryan Gosling, a blog that pairs the popular “Hey Girl” meme with public history theory.  The project has reached over 60,000 people and stimulated meaningful conversation in various corners of the Internet.  Read More

Independent Research for the Independent Consultant Part 2: Making Your Clients’ Interests Your Research Interests

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In Part I, I talked about balancing your consulting work with your own research work. Setting aside the fact that pursuing your own research in addition to your consulting work may throw the rest of your life out of kilter, you will have to assign a rather high priority to your own research—after your clients’ needs, of course—if you want it to come to fruition in the form of publications. Read More

Fail better? Failure and public history

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black and white arrowsI’ve been thinking about failure and public history. Failure—and mistakes more generally—aren’t concepts we like to consider. The word is intertwined with feelings of shame and humiliation, private emotions which are the antithesis of the public nature of public history. Many people’s impulse is to hide failure or “spin” it, the clichéd strategy of “making lemons out of lemonade.” Read More

Preservation conversations: When history at work is history at home (Part II)

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Before the mid-1960s, except for domestics and a few other exceptions, South Decatur was exclusively white. It was a place Decatur’s blacks knew to not be after sundown. They knew that they were welcome to clean houses, cut lawns, and bag groceries there during the day but the suburban dream being lived by their white employers was beyond reach. Read More