06 June 2017 – Priya Chhaya
When we agreed to chair the program committee for the 2018 NCPH annual meeting, we were determined to develop a conference that reflected the richness of the field but also addressed, with a sense of urgency, pressing questions about the profession’s relationship to the public. Read More
01 June 2017 – Will Walker
As I made my way through the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s five floors of exhibitions, it was the museum’s effective use of objects to convey both individual and collective narratives and big ideas about history that most impressed me. Read More
30 May 2017 – Will Walker 4
The first time I tried to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture, my friends and I got only as far as the grassy area on the Constitution Ave. side of the building. Less than a month after the museum’s grand opening in September 2016, the feeling around the David Adjaye-designed masterpiece that Sunday was electric. Read More
25 May 2017 – David Rotenstein 1
In the 1990s, Silver Spring, Maryland, was desperate for economic investment and an image makeover. Next door to Washington, D.C., the Montgomery County suburb had suffered from two decades of disinvestment and white flight. Once a thriving community with a booming commercial district and sprawling inner-ring suburban neighborhoods, Silver Spring had become blighted by vacant storefronts and empty parking lots. Read More
23 May 2017 – James F. Brooks
Editor’s note: We publish TPH editor James F. Brooks’s introduction to the May 2017 issue of The Public Historian. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members.
I write on March 8, 2017, International Women’s Day, unexpectedly fitting for the contents of this May issue of The Public Historian. Read More
22 May 2017 – editors
From around the field this week: In or around Washington DC? Attend the board meeting of the National Museum and Library Services board on May 24; conferences on digital directions, placeless memories, the Underground Railroad’s unfinished business, history in action, memory studies; National Council on Public History submission deadlines coming up Read More
18 May 2017 – Betsy Newman 1
For the last five years, South Carolina ETV, the state’s public television network, has been experimenting with ways to tell the story of a 16,000-acre undeveloped property called Hobcaw Barony. Hobcaw, from a Native American word meaning “between the waters,” has a long history of human occupation that stretches from Native American settlement through slavery and Reconstruction to the twentieth century, when it became the winter hunting retreat of financier Bernard Baruch. Read More
16 May 2017 – Jordan Biro Walters 1
In her 1903 work Social Culture, Annie Randall White encouraged unmarried women over the age of thirty to form domestic partnerships with each other: “Many of our ‘bachelor girls’ live together and are the happiest people imaginable.” [1]
Yet just two years later, Dr. Read More
08 May 2017 – Jim McGrath, Robyn Schroeder, and Inge Zwart
Like “public history,” “public humanities” is a concept that seems relatively straightforward but quickly proves hard to define and explain (especially when we are asked to do so by our friends and relatives). Read More
02 May 2017 – editors
From around the field this week: Day of Public Humanities on May 9; nominate US public historians for Herbert Feis Award; journal issue seeks contributions on “Museums in the Age of Trump”; biographers converge on Boston; new issues of oral history, city museums journals Read More