30 August 2017 – Aaron Shapiro
I find The Public Historian indispensable not only for keeping up with the field but also for introducing students to public history scholarship. And while I regularly assign more recent articles, I often return to David Glassberg’s “Public History and the Study of Memory” (vol. Read More
28 August 2017 – Melissa Barthelemy 4
In June, my brother and I traveled from Santa Barbara, California to Orlando, Florida to help document the one-year remembrance events and exhibitions honoring the victims, survivors, and all those affected by the Pulse Nightclub shooting. On June 12, 2016, forty-nine people were killed and sixty-eight people were injured by a gunman during a Latinx Night at Pulse, a gay (LGBTQ+) nightclub. Read More
24 August 2017 – Dina A. Bailey
A teachable moment at the 2017 AAM Conference
In walking through the expo hall at the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) conference in May, a friend of mine and I came upon one of the vendor displays that showed the figure of an enslaved black man shackled to a pole and a grey (white) auctioneer figure standing as if to accept bids. Read More
16 August 2017 – editors
From around the field this week: several new grant and fellowship cycles have begun for the IMLS, Gilder Lehrman, the ACLS, and the National Humanities Center; conferences in Chicago, Illinois and Cologne, Germany have submission deadlines this month; the New England Museum Association is offering a free workshop on salary negotiation for women; a group of Canadian history organizations is holding the first-ever Canadian history Twitter conference. Read More
15 August 2017 – James F. Brooks
Editor’s note: We publish TPH editor James F. Brooks’s introduction to the August 2017 issue of The Public Historian. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members.
At first glance, a collection of essays that range from Jesuit Mission historic sites to faux Indian statuary to Liberty ships and war museums seem impossible to arrange in a conceptual matrix—at once evidence of the great range of public history engagements and, simultaneously, a scattershot deployment of their substance. Read More
11 August 2017 – Paul Ringel 1
Consider a public history project on a Jim Crow era black high school in North Carolina, staffed by a white professor and three dozen predominantly white students. Add a growing level of distrust between the private, rapidly expanding university from which the project emerged, and the poor, largely non-white, surrounding community that was the home neighborhood for this high school. Read More
08 August 2017 – Kate Fox
Popular culture has recently taken a renewed interest in gardening—food gardening in particular. In 2014, Smithsonian Gardens created Community of Gardens, a crowdsourced initiative to preserve our vernacular garden heritage. Now, the free and newly-released Community of Gardens app allows people to easily explore the stories, videos, and images in the Community of Gardens digital archive in a mobile-friendly environment, as well as locate stories and gardens nearby. Read More
02 August 2017 – editors
From around the field this week: the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers University – Camden is offering a new continuing education certificate program in historic preservation, with classes and workshops starting in September; the Centre for Public History at Queen’s University Belfast has announced its first annual conference will take place later this year; and the New England Museum Association’s Excellence Award nominations are due before the end of the month. Read More
20 July 2017 – editors
From around the field this week: It’s summer! Things are quiet. But the Digital Directions conference is coming up next month in Seattle; online courses on museum storage and grant funding are starting soon; and the Serbian-language magazine of the International Council of Museums is available for the first time in English. Read More
14 July 2017 – GVGK Tang
The Semiotics of Sex: A History of Queer Identity Politics is a multi-platform digital history project that explores various methodologies for historicizing queer activism and identity for public consumption. Through a commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the world’s first queer political protest, the project demonstrates that digital tools are a vital resource for public historians interpreting queer history. Read More