Tag Archive
03 November 2025 – Jonathan Schwartz
In 1944, the Hungarian government carried out two operations simultaneously. More than 430,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz in just eight weeks, while at the same time state officials—commissioners, police, and museum staff—systematically confiscated their art collections. The records of this bureaucratized looting survived on microfilm, largely untouched for decades. Read More
29 October 2025 – Madison Haine 1
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a 2025 History@Work series authored by members of the NCPH Labor Task Force in response to our Special Open Call on “#Advocacy in the Field.” In addition, this piece is part of a series based on Rutgers University student interviews with practicing public historians. Read More
22 January 2025 – Tyler Jones
Something remarkable is happening in rural Alabama: a former plantation is being reimagined as a place for truth and reconciliation. But what’s most notable is who is behind it. A group of Black descendants of the formerly enslaved, and white descendants of the enslavers, have together formed the Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation, a non-profit dedicated to reparative history through art. Read More
01 February 2022 – Michelle Duster 3
suffrage, art, women's history, community history, public art, memory, sense of place, race, monuments
A few years ago, Curious City ran an article highlighting the dearth of representation of women in public statuary in Chicago and asked for suggestions on who should be honored. Several dozen were named, with several of them being women of color. Read More
03 March 2021 – Doris Morgan Rueda 3
Art was how I first encountered and understood history. Today, as a doctoral candidate researching the transnational legal history of juvenile justice in the American borderlands, I explore the history of the surveillance and policing of youth in places such as public schools, places of worship, and social services through historical visual sources and my own multi-media art. Read More
24 December 2020 – Hayley Noble
The Old Idaho Penitentiary was the site of seven riots and disturbances and some of the structural damage from these actions is still evident today. For years, the exhibits and signage on display at the Old Idaho Penitentiary Historic Site never discussed the riots, so in early 2019 it was determined that the site’s latest exhibit should explain the damage still visible to visitors, contextualize the actions of prisoners and administrators, and connect historical situations in corrections to current affairs. Read More
09 July 2019 – Melissa Barthelemy 1
art, LGBTQ history, methods, social justice, public engagement, TPH 41.2, media, speech, graduate students, The Public Historian, gender/sexuality, gender
Editors’ Note: This post is one of two History@Work pieces inspired by the current special issue of The Public Historian: “Queering Public History,” Vol. 41, No. 2. You can read additional LGBTQ reports from the field in this NCPH ePublication, which complements The Public Historian issue and these blog posts. Read More
04 July 2019 – David Rotenstein 1
community history, collaboration, historic preservation, National Historic Preservation Act, Immigration, advocacy, art
Jack Schmitt has mixed feelings about the way that the Pennsylvania Route 28 project turned out. On one hand, the longtime Pittsburgh historic preservation advocate beams when he talks about how he successfully convinced the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) to replicate historic Pennsylvania Canal lock stones in a retaining wall in the urban highway corridor. Read More
09 October 2017 – Peter A. Kopp, Norma Hartell, and Jerry D. Wallace 1
During the summer of 2015, a group of scholars, students, and artists trekked under the sweltering New Mexico sun with cameras and notebooks in hand to document public murals in the city of Las Cruces. What began as a student project in a public history seminar at New Mexico State University grew into the Murals of Las Cruces Project. Read More
25 May 2017 – David Rotenstein 1
In the 1990s, Silver Spring, Maryland, was desperate for economic investment and an image makeover. Next door to Washington, D.C., the Montgomery County suburb had suffered from two decades of disinvestment and white flight. Once a thriving community with a booming commercial district and sprawling inner-ring suburban neighborhoods, Silver Spring had become blighted by vacant storefronts and empty parking lots. Read More