04 March 2016 – editors
Environmental Racism and Lead Poisoning in Flint
I study environmental justice movements, both contemporary and historical. Lead (along with asthma) has been a central urban environmental health issue in the US that hits racial minorities and working-class people particularly hard. Lead is often thought of, for that reason, as an example of environmental racism. Read More
02 March 2016 – Sharon Leon
TPH 38.1, "Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology" responses, public engagement, digital history, The Public Historian
Andrew Hurley’s article, “Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology,” begins with the launch of the Virtual City Project in 1999 and brings us up to the present moment. In that span of time, Hurley and his colleagues at the University of Missouri-St. Read More
01 March 2016 – editors
From around the field this week: Public history posters in Bogotà, conference on slave dwellings in South Carolina, reflecting on collections in Manchester, U.K. and preserving/promoting them with National Endowment for the Humanities grants Read More
29 February 2016 – Adina Langer
museums, oral history, music, exhibitions, theater, popular culture, methods, public engagement, memory
My recent review of the Georgia Social Studies Standards, as part of my work at the Museum of History and Holocaust Education, galvanized my desire to reflect on the importance of the Broadway musical, Allegiance, which tells the story in fictionalized form of George Takei’s family’s experience in internment camps during World War II. Read More
26 February 2016 – Kristen Treen
Unlike the Confederate flag, photographs enable the viewer to look the past in the eyes with a degree of sympathy, to interpret gesture, emotional expression, and the suggestive personal proffering of military possessions through a medium with which we now express ourselves on a daily basis. Read More
24 February 2016 – Ellen Noonan 1
memory, race, The Public Historian, TPH 38.1, "Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton" responses
Lyra Monteiro is certainly right, when she notes in her review of Hamilton: An American Musical, that mainstream American culture has a lamentable tendency to embrace and retell certain stories about American history, including that of the founders, with greater frequency and enthusiasm than the many other stories that require more difficult reckonings with the past. Read More
22 February 2016 – Adina Langer
Editor’s note: Many of the issues discussed in this two-part post will be further examined in upcoming responses on this blog to “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton,” published in The Public Historian (38.1) See this introductory post about the TPH issue. Read More
19 February 2016 – Kristen Treen
Editor’s note: This two-part post continues our series addressing recent debates over Confederate memory and symbolism in the wake of the shooting of nine parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. Here is the opening post for the series. Read More
17 February 2016 – James F. Brooks
Editor’s note: We publish TPH editor James Brooks’s introduction to the February 2016 issue of The Public Historian. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members. Responses to Andrew Hurley’s essay and Lyra Monteiro’s review will be published on History@Work in the coming weeks. Read More
16 February 2016 – editors
From around the field this week:
Summer workshops in Berlin and Lviv on Eastern European Jewish histories and German Holocaust archives; automotive heritage in Pennsylvania; colliding stories at Missouri Conference on History; workshop in Kansas for religious communities interested in creating archives. Read More