Tag Archive
23 August 2016 – editors
Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site recently launched Prisons Today: Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration, the first major museum exhibit to tackle this civil rights issue.* Prisons Today asks open-ended questions and encourages dialogue among visitors about America’s past and present prison systems. Read More
09 August 2016 – David Rotenstein 2
On July 4, about 60 people attended a party thrown by Washington, DC activists trying to save a historic water filtration plant. The event was held in a row house in the city’s gentrifying Bloomingdale neighborhood, which I wrote about in a recent History@Work post. 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
17 March 2016 – Susan Ferentinos
I decided to become a professional historian in a campground in Ohio in the summer of 1994. I was spending the day lounging at my campsite, reading About Time: Exploring the Gay Past, by Martin Duberman, when his essay “’Writhing Bedfellows’ in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence” got me so fired up that I decided it was time to go out and do what I could to bring the past to the people. Read More
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
28 January 2016 – David Rotenstein
Gentrification: It’s not just for sociologists and anthropologists any more. Though historians have been making inroads documenting and interpreting gentrification and displacement, there are abundant opportunities for historians to make significant contributions in public policy and planning. One recent kerfuffle involving proposed bicycle lanes and African American churches in Washington, DC, provides a window into how a better understanding of the past could have defused a racially and class charged debate over painted lines in public spaces.
04 January 2016 – Jason Steinhauer 1
In January 2015, I introduced the idea of History Communicators on this blog. “History Communicators, like Science Communicators,” I wrote then, “will advocate for policy decisions informed by historical research; step beyond the walls of universities and institutions and participate in public debates; author opinion pieces; engage in conversation with policymakers and the public; and work diligently to communicate history in a populist tone that has mass appeal across print, video, and audio. Read More
10 December 2015 – Sam Imperatrice and Mary Rizzo 1
advocacy, gentrification, The Public Historian, National Historic Preservation Act, National Historic Preservation Act commemoration
Editor’s note: This post continues a series commemorating the anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act by examining a past article published in The Public Historian, describing its significance and relating it to contemporary conversations in historic preservation.
In this latest post in our series on the National Historic Preservation Act, Mary Rizzo, former co-editor of The Public Historian and current assistant professor of professional practice at Rutgers University-Newark, interviews Sam Imperatrice about the article “Geographies of Displacement: Latina/os, Oral History, and the Politics of Gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District,” by Nancy Raquel Mirabel. Read More
08 December 2015 – Will Walker
As I’ve read obsessively the news of campus protests these past few weeks and shared support for protesters both publicly on social media and privately in email conversations with college administrators, I’ve been challenged to think deeply about my position as both a public historian and a faculty member at a state university. Read More
01 October 2015 – Adina Langer
In a surprising turn of events, the College Board re-revised the Advanced Placement United States History curriculum framework, releasing its newest version at the end of July. While the move by the Board, which had instituted a public comment period seeking feedback on the framework back in February, is not overly surprising, the reaction among many historians and among the opponents of the original revised framework is. Read More