Remembering Cliff Kuhn

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Like so many of my friends and colleagues across the full spectrum of the historical profession, I am thankful for having known Cliff Kuhn. His death three weeks ago took us all by surprise. Cliff radiated vitality–intellectual, spiritual and personal. He was known for cycling every morning from his home in Atlanta’s Virginia Highland neighborhood to his office at Georgia State University in the heart of downtown. Read More

Jack the Ripper Museum

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In August 2015, a museum that had originally been billed as “the first women’s museum in the UK” opened instead as the Jack the Ripper Museum on Cable Street in the East End of London. ‘Jack the Ripper,’ an anonymous figure who murdered and mutilated at least five women in the late nineteenth century, has become the focus of a museum that had once been promised to represent and celebrate untold histories of women. Read More

Leo Frank commemoration: Museum partnerships and controversial topics

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As museums increasingly become spaces for engaging challenging topics, three metro Atlanta institutions joined together to address a century-old rift in the community. Using expanded audiences, a shared strategic mission, and a network of public historians, the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History forged a partnership with the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum and the Museum of History and Holocaust Education to present the exhibit, “Seeking Justice: The Leo Frank Case Revisited.” Read More

Civil War memory and American gun culture

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Ashley Halsey Jr. was frustrated when the civil rights movement defeated the Lost Cause. The United States Civil War Centennial Commission had invited the Saturday Evening Post associate editor and Civil War buff to be the featured speaker at the 1961 centennial commemoration of the firing on Fort Sumter in his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. Read More