In my undergraduate public history course at the State University of New York at Cortland, sophomores usually make up the majority of students. Several of these students have not yet taken our “welcome-to-the-history-major” historical methods class. Our history department requires all our majors to take Introduction to Public History (HIS 280) in order to graduate, and students only need one history survey course before they sign up for this class. Read More
In October 2017, historians, librarians, scientists, and members of the general public gathered at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis for the Hoosier Women in STEM Wikipedia edit-a-thon. Read More
Whenever public historians first began working in academic units, it is likely that soon after, their peers questioned whether public history scholarship—exhibitions, class projects, and reports—counted toward tenure. “Count” is academic shorthand for work that is considered to be scholarship or research. Read More
The study and practice of family history is fraught with methodological, historiographical, practical, ethical, and cultural concerns for scholars and practitioners alike.[1] In trying to design an event that might respond to and interrogate these concerns, we asked: What new knowledge might be created if we bring scholars together to discuss the phenomenal growth of family history in different nations? Read More
At the beginning of May, NCPH opened up our Call for Proposals for the 2018 annual meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, with the theme “Power Lines.” The theme is apt for a conference in Vegas, and especially timely in the current political climate as we evaluate how power shapes our professional and personal lives—and what power we might have as public historians to shape the future. Read More
When we agreed to chair the program committee for the 2018 NCPH annual meeting, we were determined to develop a conference that reflected the richness of the field but also addressed, with a sense of urgency, pressing questions about the profession’s relationship to the public. Read More
For the last five years, South Carolina ETV, the state’s public television network, has been experimenting with ways to tell the story of a 16,000-acre undeveloped property called Hobcaw Barony. Hobcaw, from a Native American word meaning “between the waters,” has a long history of human occupation that stretches from Native American settlement through slavery and Reconstruction to the twentieth century, when it became the winter hunting retreat of financier Bernard Baruch. Read More
James Oliver Horton, emeritus professor of history and American Studies at the George Washington University, died on February 20, 2017 after a long illness.
Jim Horton was, at heart, a teacher. A former student, Dr. Laurel Clark Shire, recalled his tremendous faith that “all history, no matter how sophisticated or basic, could be presented to any audience.” Read More
Oral history, like public history, is now old enough to have its own history, its own founding narrative. As one might expect from a field so deeply devoted to challenging incomplete and exclusive narratives, oral historians are now asking what is left out of their own history and filling in some of the gaps they have found. Read More
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At the beginning of May, NCPH opened up our