Tag Archive
13 January 2025 – Denise Meringolo
Editor’s note: This post was published in Volume 44 Number 4 of Public History News, NCPH’s quarterly newsletter. It is cross-posted here in response to History@Work‘s current Special Call for posts on “advocacy in the field.”
During this past election year there was a predictable uptick in the number of opinion pieces regarding historians’ work as public intellectuals, particularly as political commentators. Read More
06 January 2025 – Ummul Muhseneen
advocacy, oral history, commemoration, memorials, memorial museum, traumatic histories, NCPH 2024 Awards, victim recognition, 1971 Bangladesh Genocide
As part of my dissertation research on the memorialization of the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide, I have encountered silences in related memorials and in the archives. These silences have led me to ask: What role might oral testimonies play in remedying the silences that surround official attempts to memorialize mass atrocity crimes? Read More
18 April 2024 – Kristen Baldwin Deathridge and Sam Opsahl
The idea for the National Council on Public History began, in part, as a way to advocate for our field. In recent years the advocacy committee and NCPH leadership have responded to calls from the membership to expand the organization’s advocacy. Read More
04 August 2022 – Madeline Hellmich 1
digital media, advocacy, social justice, public engagement, community history, collaboration, race, NCPH 2022 awards
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of reflections from winners of NCPH awards in 2022. Madeline Hellmich is the winner of a graduate student travel award.
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which launched in 2001, is the seventh-most visited website in the world. Read More
02 August 2022 – Sarah H. Case
advocacy, interpretation, The Public Historian, slavery, historic preservation, commemoration, historic house museums
Editors’ Note: We publish the editor’s introduction to the August 2022 issue of The Public Historian here. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members and to others with subscription access. Read More
14 June 2022 – Henry J. Kennedy and Nathan R. Stenberg 1
It is time for a Smithsonian National Museum of Disability History and Culture. Considering the fact that one in four Americans, or approximately 61 million people, is disabled, a national museum would acknowledge disability as an essential component of American life. Read More
07 June 2022 – Diana M. Katovitch 8
The Pennhurst Haunted Asylum and the Pennhurst Museum, operated by Pennhurst LLC in collaboration with the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance (PMPA), exist side-by-side on the grounds of the shuttered Pennhurst State School and Hospital in Spring City, Pennsylvania. The sites might seem to have opposite goals: one to frighten and entertain, the other to educate about past wrongs. Read More
31 May 2022 – Chelsea D. Chamberlain and Elliott W. Simon
Founded in 1852 as the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children, Elwyn is the oldest continuously operating educational facility for people with intellectual disabilities in the United States. Today, headquartered just outside Philadelphia, it is a large multi-state provider of community-based and residential supports to people with a wide range of disabilities. Read More
24 May 2022 – James W. Conroy and Katrina N. Jirik
Many countries have erected memorials to the state-sponsored suffering of their citizens, such as the Gedenkstaette memorial in Dachau, Germany and Freedom Park in Pretoria, South Africa. For more than 150 years, millions of Americans with developmental disabilities were segregated, isolated, neglected, and abused in overcrowded, state-funded institutions, as poignantly detailed in disability rights scholar Burton Blatt’s Christmas in Purgatory. Read More
07 December 2021 – Braden Paynter
Editor’s note: This is our third installment of the “Public Historians in Our Climate Emergency” series.
Historic sites have a critical role to play in advancing environmental and climate justice, using history and place to unlock the root causes of both harm and the ongoing resistance to addressing that harm. Read More