Tag Archive

African American history

Our Side of the Tracks: Community Curation of Black History in Acworth, Georgia (Part 2)

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The second of two installments in a series exploring the development of the “Our Side of the Tracks” exhibit at Doyal Hill Park in Acworth, Georgia. Part One described the origins of the project, starting with the partnership between Kennesaw State University’s Department of Museums, Archives and Rare Books and the city of Acworth, Georgia, as well as providing background on developmental changes over the past 40 years in Acworth’s historically Black neighborhoods. Read More

Our Side of the Tracks: Community Curation of Black History in Acworth, Georgia (Part 1)

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The first of two installments in a series exploring the development of the “Our Side of the Tracks” exhibit at Doyal Hill Park in Acworth, Georgia, Part One describes the origins of the project, starting with the partnership between Kennesaw State University’s Department of Museums, Archives and Rare Books and the City of Acworth, Georgia, as well as providing background on developmental changes over the past forty years in Acworth’s historically Black neighborhoods. Read More

Centering African American history in a public history course

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I first became interested in public history as a child. My church often had events that celebrated Black history. And at least once a year, my schools would create bulletin boards highlighting the achievements of African Americans. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I knew that I wanted to teach courses that explored how this history has been taught in public spaces. Read More

Re-Designing Historic Space: Corrective Landscape Planning at Stagville State Historic Site

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Editors Note: How do historical sites reckon with landscape within interpretive plans? Mary Biggs joins us to explore how one former plantation space in North Carolina uses the landscape on which formally enslaved people worked and lived to reconceptualize visitor experience at that site.  Read More

Reflecting on the Georgia Incarceration Performance Project

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Editor’s note: This essay is part of a series of reflective posts written by winners of awards intended to be given out at the NCPH 2020 annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. Jan Levinson-Hebbard of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia received an honorable mention for the Outstanding Public History Project Award. Read More

Commemorating the Tulsa Massacre: A Search for Identity and Historical Complexity

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When HBO’s Watchmen aired on October 20th last year, it introduced millions of Americans to the explosive episode of racial terror that gripped the black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma from May 30th to June 1st, 1921. The TV show dramatizes how white Americans used guns and even makeshift bombs to destroy millions of dollars in property and murdered an estimated 100 to 300 African Americans over the course of three days (the “aftermath” of which is pictured here). Read More

“What Could It Have [Been] Then?”: Reflecting on the origins and historiography of a plantation historic site

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A big house. Stately trees. Curious outbuildings. In 1905, Pennsylvania-born tourist Matilda Kessinger marveled at the landscape before her, “something one always reads about but never sees.” After 18 years of traveling the South, Kessinger had finally found the one place that lived up to her romantic ideals of an antebellum plantation. Read More

Preserving Asbury Park’s African American Music Heritage

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Editors’ Note: This post is part of a History@Work series that complements “The Public Historian,” volume 40, number 3, which is about the history of the field of Black Museums.

Entertainment and music are a big piece of Asbury Park’s history. Read More