08 April 2016 – editors
Ask a Practitioner, Ask a Consulting Historian, methods, entrepreneurialism, consultants, employment
Jan Dilg is an independent historian and the principal of HistoryBuilt, a historical consulting firm. She works with public agencies, non-profits, and historical organizations on a variety of public history programs, events, and products.
How did you first become involved in historical consulting? Read More
06 April 2016 – Annette Gordon-Reed 14
"Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton" responses, race, The Public Historian, theater, TPH 38.1
This past August, I went with a group of historians to see the much acclaimed, and now Grammy-winning, musical, Hamilton. Our timing was just right. The ticket prices were reasonable (for the Great White Way), costing nowhere near the astronomical sums people pay now. Read More
04 April 2016 – Donna Neary 6
My transition from public history to teaching was unplanned. After twenty-five years of working for local, state and federal governments, museums, non-profits, and as a consultant, I was unemployed, cut loose, and drifting out of sight of the public history mother ship. Read More
01 April 2016 – Jennifer Stevens
Choosing to go into business for yourself means a willingness to ride the ebbs and flows of unpredictability. Some of those rides can be pretty challenging, and the start-up period is no doubt the first and perhaps the most daunting of them all. Read More
30 March 2016 – David Hochfelder
TPH 38.1, digital divide, "Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology" responses, public engagement, community history, digital history, The Public Historian
In his article, “Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology: Public History Meets the Digital Divide,” Andrew Hurley does the public history community a great service. He does more than tell us a cautionary tale about rushing headlong into digital approaches to public history and leaving target audiences behind. Read More
29 March 2016 – editors
From around the field this week: 20 years after Raphael Samuel’s death, a commemorative conference in London on radical histories; interdisciplinary symposium in Beijing explores the intertwined terms “vernacular” and “heritage”; Texas material culture symposium focuses on transition and change. Read More
29 March 2016 – editors
“The Middle: Where did we come from? Where are we going?”
CALL FOR PAPERS – 2017 Annual Meeting National Council on Public History
Indianapolis, Indiana, April 19-22, 2017 Read More
28 March 2016 – editors
Jeff Sellers serves as the curator of education at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville, TN, and has been there since 2005. He is past-president of the Inter-museum Council of Nashville and currently serves on the National Council On Public History New Professional Award Committee. Read More
25 March 2016 – editors 1
A personal perspective on the Flint water crisis
My thoughts on the Flint water crisis stem from a personal perspective, as well as my academic interests in deindustrialization, African American history, and heritage tourism. When I was two years old, my dad was offered a job as a reference librarian at the University of Michigan-Flint. Read More
23 March 2016 – David Dean
"Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton" responses, The Public Historian, performance, music, theater, TPH 38.1
Public historians have spent a good deal of time looking at how history is performed in museums and living history sites, in reenactments, and on film and television. Theatre, opera, and musicals have received far less attention, and one reason for this might be that these forms of representation are often thought of as elitist.[1] Read More