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

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What if after you bought the historic house of your dreams in a neighborhood that billed itself as “historic” you found out that your definition of historic clashed with that of your new neighbors? As a historian with nearly thirty years under my belt in history and historic preservation, that’s precisely what happened in 2011 when my wife and I bought a small Craftsman-influenced home in a Decatur, Georgia, neighborhood. Read More

Would you like a side of history with that? Toward a more holistic public history practice

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Around the time that I took on my current position with The Trustees of Reservations, the organization made an internal change: our historic resources department became the cultural landscapes department, our historic resources staff the cultural resources staff. Why was this significant? Read More

Mind in the marketplace (Part 3): A practical primer

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What kind of knowledge and skills do you need in order to create a viable historical consulting practice?

Becoming a consultant requires more than simply deciding to work for yourself.  It requires the shift to a new mindset, because as an independent consultant you become a creature of the marketplace.  Read More

Preservation conversations: Reflections on a visit to Shanghai and Cixi, China

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I was fortunate enough to be invited to China earlier this summer for a conference on urban planning, historic preservation, and cultural development. With so much hyperbole in the press about the “Chinese century,” I expected to be swept away by the stunning economic growth of the Asian giant. Read More

Reflecting on Texts: Steven Lubar on Trouillot's "Silencing the Past"

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NOTE:  This post is part of a new and, we hope, semi-regular series in which public history educators share insights and observations about their use of “classic” texts in the public history classroom.

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Michel Rolph Trouillot, historian, anthropologist, Haitian intellectual and University of Chicago professor, died in July at age 63.  Read More

Identifying historic photos? Think outside the social media box

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Earlier this summer, as temperatures soared above 100 degrees in El Paso, I was tucked away in a cool room inside the University of Texas El Paso Library’s Special Collection department. I was working with the Casasola Photograph Collection, which holds prints and negatives from the popular Casasola Studio that was located in Downtown El Paso, Texas. Read More

Project Showcase: Each Moment a Mountain

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web site imageEach Moment a Mountain is a public history and digital humanities project that celebrates art and thought inspired by the wealth of materials housed in freely available digital archives. Showcased are poetry, fiction, non-fiction, art, multimedia, comics, humanities scholarship and other digitally representable creations that engage with text or images from our featured historical archives. Read More

Mind in the marketplace (Part 2): Encouragement for independent consultants?

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When I started graduate school in the now-distant year of 1979, public history was still in its infancy. Within view of the spot that I habitually occupied in the basement of the university library, two or three loose issues (the entire run to date) of The Public Historian perched precariously on an otherwise empty stack shelf. Read More

What "counts" as a public history dissertation? Some views from the field

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stack of booksAs I approach my second year of doctoral studies in history, I find myself thinking often about dissertation topics. These ruminations may be premature. General exams have not even clouded my horizon yet. Still, I feel a special burden to choose topics wisely because I hope to secure an academic job teaching in a public history program. Read More