In my years as a historical consultant, I did several projects for agencies such as the National Park Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Much like the church for which I now work, these agencies are interested in their past, but also are sensitive to criticisms that have been levied against them by opposing groups, such as environmental organizations. Read More
Some time ago, I had the opportunity of hearing a presentation by Daniel Walker Howe, a historian who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his book What Hath God Wrought: A History of the United States, 1815-1848. In the course of the seminar, Howe made a plea for academic historians to stop ignoring the general public in their work, declaring that it was time for historians to stop talking only to each other and to engage the larger public. Read More
Earlier this summer, as temperatures soared above 100 degrees in El Paso, I was tucked away in a cool room inside the University of Texas El Paso Library’s Special Collection department. I was working with the Casasola Photograph Collection, which holds prints and negatives from the popular Casasola Studio that was located in Downtown El Paso, Texas. Read More
Each Moment a Mountain is a public history and digital humanities project that celebrates art and thought inspired by the wealth of materials housed in freely available digital archives. Showcased are poetry, fiction, non-fiction, art, multimedia, comics, humanities scholarship and other digitally representable creations that engage with text or images from our featured historical archives. Read More
The National Archives at Kansas City welcomed four local Wikipedians for a Meetup and Scanathon Saturday on June 16, 2012. The meetup theme was “Between the Rivers” and focused on photos and textual holdings related to the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Read More
With the completion of a year-long grant project this month, participants in Northwest Digital Archives’ Expanding Access Grant will have exposed almost 500 new collections in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana through NWDA’s database. The database, which offers access to more than 11,500 finding aids for archival collections at thirty-seven institutions, is an efficient means for collection discovery and exposure at a wide variety of institutions and repositories. Read More
Nearly thirty years ago, a small collective of twenty- and thirty-something LGBT activists in Chicago founded the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives. Active in the Gay Liberation movement and other social protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, these grassroots historians collected LGBT materials and reclaimed the past as part of the production of a proud political identity. Read More
Since my September arrival in Chile, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights has become a common ground for my historical work, with handfuls of visits to its Center of Documentation for conversations and conferences, and the permanent exhibit. Although not a physical or recovered site connected to human rights violations, it sits squarely in the memory landscape of Chile, a barely-born institution that has made waves since its 2010 inauguration under then-President Michele Bachalet. Read More
Our public history program works to help students develop an understanding of the role that history can play in fostering a sense of community identity. We also train students to practice as responsible and ethical professionals. Service-learning opportunities provide the core pedagogical method for both these goals. Read More
The Smithsonian is, of course, not the only institution associated with the federal government that maintains an archive about its own history. The National Park Service, for example, has made a substantial investment in documenting the histories of its parks. Read More
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