Public history and public policy: A view from across the pond

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Looking from across the pond, the maturity and scale of public history as a discipline and a sector in the US is a striking phenomenon.  The narrative is well-established: the crisis in the academic job market; the emergence of new contexts for historical employment, in preservation, education and regeneration; the entrepreneurship of universities in structuring the supply of skilled professionals through new programmes emphasising workplace skills and experience. Read More

Love Letters to Philadelphia: Gendering an urban brand (Part 2)

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elevated subway tracks“There was this young man from West Philadelphia,” our tour guide, Barbara, told the group of us assembled on hard plastic chairs. “He was a tagger, a graffiti artist, kept getting in trouble. He finally got sent to jail, and when he got out his girlfriend told him she didn’t want him around their baby anymore. Read More

Letters from Chile: A photo gallery

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In addition to the photos that have accompanied Zach McKiernan’s “Letters from Chile” series this spring, there have been many more that we didn’t post with the articles, but which we’re including here in a visual addendum to the series. All are by the author unless otherwise noted. Read More

Project Showcase: Expanding Northwest Digital Archives

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With the completion of a year-long grant project this month, participants in Northwest Digital Archives’ Expanding Access Grant will have exposed almost 500 new collections in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana through NWDA’s database. The database, which offers access to more than 11,500 finding aids for archival collections at thirty-seven institutions, is an efficient means for collection discovery and exposure at a wide variety of institutions and repositories. Read More

Letters from Chile: A dead dictator's homage, a public history movement (Part 2)

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/continued from Part I

At the outset of this series, I proposed two seemingly simple questions in hopes of unpacking the complexity of sites of memory and how they “engage citizens in human rights issues” vis-à-vis the past.  What type of historic work is taking place?  Read More

Letters from Chile: A dead dictator's homage, a public history movement (Part 1)

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This past Sunday, June 10, the right-wing Corporation 11 de Septiembre held an homage to the dead dictator Augusto Pinochet under the auspices of a documentary screening at the iconic Teatro Caupolican in Santiago Centro. That day it was answered and challenged in sometimes violent ways by diverse sectors of society and weeks before when many of Santiago’s notably non-violent human rights organizations and sites of memory maneuvered to use legal and political recourse to prevent a ceremony that celebrated a leader infamous for overseeing an era of human rights violations. Read More