The Pennhurst Haunted Asylum and the Pennhurst Museum, operated by Pennhurst LLC in collaboration with the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance (PMPA), exist side-by-side on the grounds of the shuttered Pennhurst State School and Hospital in Spring City, Pennsylvania. The sites might seem to have opposite goals: one to frighten and entertain, the other to educate about past wrongs. Read More
From Around the Field this week: NCPH calls for proposals for 2023 conference; the American Association for State and Local History releases a census of history orgs; the Missouri Speakers Bureau is seeking applicants for their 2022-2024 program cycle
Founded in 1852 as the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children, Elwyn is the oldest continuously operating educational facility for people with intellectual disabilities in the United States. Today, headquartered just outside Philadelphia, it is a large multi-state provider of community-based and residential supports to people with a wide range of disabilities. Read More
Many countries have erected memorials to the state-sponsored suffering of their citizens, such as the Gedenkstaette memorial in Dachau, Germany and Freedom Park in Pretoria, South Africa. For more than 150 years, millions of Americans with developmental disabilities were segregated, isolated, neglected, and abused in overcrowded, state-funded institutions, as poignantly detailed in disability rights scholar Burton Blatt’s Christmas in Purgatory.Read More
From Around the Field this week: NCPH calls for proposals for 2023 conference; the American Association for State and Local History releases a report; the Center for Jewish History and jMUSE has recently published a new book.Read More
Editors’ Note: We publish the editor’s introduction to the May 2022 issue of The Public Historian here. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members and to others with subscription access.
As Timothy Snyder, historian of Ukraine, reminds us, the myths, memories, and stories about a nation’s past shape its understanding of the present and the future. Read More
Sign Up to Receive News and Announcements Emails from NCPH
You may unsubscribe or change your preferences at anytime by emailing [email protected] Cavanaugh Hall 127, 425 University Blvd., Indianapolis, IN 46202-5140 (317) 274-2716 [email protected]
