Tag Archive
24 August 2017 – Dina A. Bailey
A teachable moment at the 2017 AAM Conference
In walking through the expo hall at the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) conference in May, a friend of mine and I came upon one of the vendor displays that showed the figure of an enslaved black man shackled to a pole and a grey (white) auctioneer figure standing as if to accept bids. Read More
27 June 2017 – Melissa Bingmann
Attending Humanities Advocacy Day this spring was a new experience for me. I have been a practicing public historian for almost 24 years working at museums and in the academy, but I had not been particularly active politically until recently. Read More
15 June 2017 – Beatrice Gurwitz
Two days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, we awoke to reports that the transition team was contemplating a proposal to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). On March 16, after almost two months of near silence on the subject, the administration released a budget blueprint even more threatening to humanities programs than had been initially reported. Read More
08 May 2017 – Jim McGrath, Robyn Schroeder, and Inge Zwart
Like “public history,” “public humanities” is a concept that seems relatively straightforward but quickly proves hard to define and explain (especially when we are asked to do so by our friends and relatives). 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
24 February 2017 – Jean-Pierre Morin
For the past seventeen years, I have worn two hats every day that I’ve gone to work. The first one is my historian hat, as I’m the staff historian for the Canadian department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs where I research the history of the institution, prepare materials for public consumption and answer questions relating to the 260-year history of Canada’s policies towards Indigenous peoples. Read More
17 February 2017 – Melissa Marietta
On November 9th, I put my kids on the bus and cried in the shower. I was embarrassed by my own visceral reaction to the news of the election and tried to recover for my day in the office. What I soon discovered, however, was that I was not alone in my shock, grief and anger. Read More
01 February 2017 – Cathy Stanton
Historians often remark that we need to do a better job of letting others in on the ways we explore and understand the past. (That was the impetus for a thought-provoking series from The Public Historian and History@Work a couple of years ago.) Read More
11 November 2016 – editors 6
How should public historians respond to the new reality of the incoming political leadership in the United States? Representative democracy in the United States has survived the bitter partisanship of the Early Republic, the Civil War, corruption and scandals, the rise of international fascism, and the paroxysms of protest against the Vietnam War, so it is likely to endure. Read More
08 September 2016 – Joseph Locke and Ben Wright
The American Yawp, the profession’s first multi-authored open textbook, contains thirty chapters and almost 300,000 words. It covers everything from indigenous creation stories to Instagram. How, with historical input accelerating and the scope of scholarship expanding, could any individual or small group of historians hope to capture the breadth of American history and to do so as expansively as a textbook demands? Read More