A Virtual Walking Tour in Decatur, Georgia: Linking Race, History, Community

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I teach a seminar on ethnography and community engagement in Goucher College’s graduate historic preservation program. Last year, I took my students to Baltimore’s Otterbein neighborhood, a historic district and one of the nation’s earliest urban homesteading neighborhoods.[i] The COVID-19 pandemic pushed our summer term online and that meant no class field trip to Baltimore, an annual program tradition. Read More

Around the Field September 9, 2020

From around the field this week: the Phillips Library announces the Frances E. Malamy Research Fellowship of the Peabody Essex Museum; the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums will host a virtual meeting on “Do Museums Still Need Objects?”; Villanova University is holding a webinar series on “Decolonizing History.” Read More

Recent trends in the field: Summarizing the findings of the Joint Task Force on Public History Education and Employment

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Editors’ Note: This is the first of five posts summarizing the findings of the Joint Task Force on Public History Education and Employment, an initiative launched in 2014 to study trends in public history education and employment.

How did the 2008 financial crisis affect public history employment? Read More

“Quar-interning”: choosing and managing a productive digital internship during COVID-19

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In the last few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that the techniques public historians use to engage communities have become increasingly digital, as have the methods we use to communicate with each other. Because COVID-19 continues to spread in the United States, public history organizations should consider how to offer enriching remote internship opportunities that are mutually beneficial to all parties involved.  Read More

Around the Field August 26, 2020

From around the field this week: the National Endowment for the Humanities offers a “Humanities Connections” grant; the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s “PastForward 2020” conference comes soon; the Indiana Historical Society hosts a virtual talk on “Rethinking Redlining & Segregation.” Read More

Community, Public History, and the Failure of the Whaling Ship Progress

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The importance of community undergirds nearly every corner and crevice of public history. From spatial communities bound by common geography to cultural communities of shared identity and lifeways, we almost instinctively understand that museums, archives, oral history projects, and other public history products require community engagement and engagement with communities. Read More

Incorporating labor history in a public history curriculum

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Grassroots protest and union activism have flourished in the decade since the Great Recession. Labor and working-class history has flourished, too, and is experiencing a resurgent interest among scholars and public historians alike. At our particular historical moment, shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests against state violence and white supremacy, labor history provides context for urgent contemporary concerns about public health, workplace health and safety, economic inequality, structural racism, and social welfare. Read More

Reflecting on the Georgia Incarceration Performance Project

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Editor’s note: This essay is part of a series of reflective posts written by winners of awards intended to be given out at the NCPH 2020 annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. Jan Levinson-Hebbard of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia received an honorable mention for the Outstanding Public History Project Award. Read More

Around the Field August 5, 2020

From around the field this week: the Association of Midwest Museums accepts submissions for their awards program; the Southern Historical Association calls for proposals for their 87th Annual Meeting; The White House Historical Association continues their Facebook Live webinar series.

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