21 March 2012 – Zachary McKiernan 4
Bike culture in Santiago de Chile has boomed in recent years, and today bicycles are veritable mainstays throughout the city. The reasons are many: an uptick in Chileans’ environmental consciousness, skyrocketing public transport prices and the slashing of services, and most importantly, according to the folks at Bicicultura, the cultural dissociation between bicycles and poverty. Read More
20 March 2012 – Cathy Stanton
You may have noticed a pause in activity here at “Off the Wall” in recent weeks. We haven’t gone out of business–we’ve just been busy as part of the recent effort of getting the National Council on Public History’s new multi-author, multi-section blog, History@Work, ready to launch. Read More
19 March 2012 – Priya Chhaya
We all have to start somewhere. Public historians arrive in the profession from a variety of different places. We are inspired to work in a field that invokes passion and a lot of heart–but at some point we have all taken our first steps into the profession, either as graduate students or as new professionals who came into our public history work from unexpected directions. Read More
19 March 2012 – editors
The Public History Program at the University of South Carolina welcomes comments on a new website, “Slavery at South Carolina College, 1801–1865: The Foundations of the University of South Carolina.” While many American colleges and universities in recent years have been researching their historical connections to the institution of racial slavery, this website is the first public acknowledgement of the role of slaves and slavery at the antebellum college that became the University of South Carolina. Read More
14 March 2012 – John Dichtl
Welcome to History@Work, a blog to represent the wide range of voices within the public history field. Consultants and contractors, graduate students, curators, archivists, and federal, state, and local historians, professors, and new professionals in all sorts of institutions and settings are invited here to catch up on news, weigh in on developments in the field, and share expertise. Read More
14 March 2012 – Cathy Stanton
As I was working on getting ready for the beta phase of “History@Work,” I took on the task of freshening up the public history blogroll that we’ve used at “Off the Wall” for the past year and a half. This turned out to be a sobering exercise: it turns out that close to half the blogs we were following have shut down or become inactive (including, just recently, the venerable Cliopatria). Read More
14 March 2012 – Briann Greenfield 7
The Connecticut Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History (CCCPH) has followed the AHA’s announcement of the “Tuning” project to establish core competencies in history with great interest. We believe this project will provide faculty with the time and resources to reflect on the essential skills of history and applaud the AHA’s attention to education. Read More
14 March 2012 – Zachary McKiernan 7
social justice, public engagement, memory, publicity, museums, human rights, international, politics, Letters from Chile, advocacy
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Zachary McKiernan, a doctoral student in public history at the University of California/Santa Barbara and a regular reviewer for “Off the Wall,” is working on a series of “Letters from Chile,” based on his current dissertation research. Read More
14 March 2012 – Adina Langer 3
2012 is an ambitious year for NCPH, marking the launch of a true locus for our craft on the World Wide Web: the “History@Work” blog located on the new digital Public History Commons. Like the field of public history, this space will take advantage of every phase the Internet has to offer: its content delivery mechanisms will be multi-faceted, its content fluid, and its reach will encompass the entire cloud. Read More
27 December 2011 – Adina Langer 1
For most of us, music videos don’t immediately bring to mind historical engagement. What’s more reflective of the current epoch than a viral YouTube video featuring feline euphony or Rebecca Black’s ultra-present-focused “Friday”?
But Arcade Fire’s “Wilderness Downtown” collaboration with Chris Milk, featuring their hit 2010 single, “We Used to Wait,” is a remarkable exception to this rule. Read More