14 March 2017 – editors
From around the field this week: Prize for Canadian public historians; conference on banking museums in Jakarta; rethinking gentrification and preservation (Rhode Island) and contested urban histories (Mexico City); workshops on oral history, cemetery preservation, ceramics, more; new books on public history, diasporic communities, archives. Read More
13 March 2017 – editors 1
Paul Chaat Smith joined the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in 2001, where he currently serves as associate curator. With Robert Warrior, he is the author of Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New Press, 1996), a standard text in Native Studies and American history courses. Read More
09 March 2017 – Tammy Gaskell
In light of the LGTBQ theme study recently released by the National Park Service, The Public Historian invites proposals for articles to be published in a special issue of the journal on LGTBQ public history to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. Read More
08 March 2017 – Judith Jennings 2
“If you just pussy foot around and try to be safe, you won’t get anything done, and they’ll still fire you. Might as well accomplish all you can.”
Sentiments like these earned Helen Matthews Lewis the title of an unruly woman. Read More
07 March 2017 – Tammy Gaskell
Public history as a discipline and as a practice is inherently collaborative. It requires that we share knowledge as well as authority. And the editors of The Public Historian would like you to share your knowledge with us and the larger community of public historians. Read More
06 March 2017 – Jennifer Whitmer Taylor
Believed to be the first museum of Reconstruction in the nation, the Woodrow Wilson Family Home (WWFH) reopened to the public on February 15, 2014 after being closed for nine years. Rather than focus solely on the life of Wilson, the new interpretation at the museum uses his teenage years living in Columbia, South Carolina as a lens to discuss one of the most misunderstood periods in American history. Read More
03 March 2017 – Linda Shopes and Amy Starecheski
Oral history, like public history, is now old enough to have its own history, its own founding narrative. As one might expect from a field so deeply devoted to challenging incomplete and exclusive narratives, oral historians are now asking what is left out of their own history and filling in some of the gaps they have found. Read More
01 March 2017 – David C. White
Editor’s Note: This is the first of a series of posts reflecting on Gregory Rosenthal’s article, “Make Roanoke Queer Again: Community History and Urban Change in a Southern City,” published in the February 2017 issue of The Public Historian, and on how the Roanoke project relates to other LGBTQ public history projects. Read More
28 February 2017 – editors
From around the field this week: Critical heritage studies in Arkansas; poetics and politics of museology in Havana; conference of humanities council in Boston; half-century retrospective on Nigeria-Biafra War history/memory; registration open for conferences on digital collections and living history; workshop on historic house museums; summer ethnographic fieldschool on a Mexican island Read More
27 February 2017 – Kirsten Delegard and Kevin Ehrman-Solberg 3
Not so long ago, few historians knew anything about GIS, or geographic information systems. Many of us saw little need to learn complicated software built on scripting languages and databases. We retreated to the familiar environment of the archives, leaving the technical challenges of GIS to geographers and computer scientists. Read More