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
Editor’s note: This is the first post of a series that continues the conversation begun in the February 2018 issue of The Public Historian with the roundtable “Responding Rapidly to Our Communities.”
When the Virginia Tech tragedy took place in April 2007, I was an adjunct at Virginia Tech (VT) and the general manager of an art house movie theater that touted itself as the “heart of Blacksburg”—located just steps from the Drillfield, VT’s version of a quad. Read More
History is all around us—in the streets, buildings, and artwork that make up the landscapes of our everyday lives. Recognizing the potential of mobile devices to connect us to these pieces of the past, historians at Marshall University developed Clio, an educational website and mobile application. Read More
Editor’s note: The post is the fifth in a series commissioned by The Public Historian that focuses on essays published in TPH that have been used effectively in the classroom. We welcome comments and further suggestions! If you have a TPH article that is a favorite in your classroom, please let us know.Read More
A thoughtful, though limited narrative prevails today of Jewish Americans returning to the lands of their ancestors in Eastern Europe. Articles abound, including in The New York Times recently, that follow a certain trajectory: a Jewish American boards a plane to find themselves in a strange land that time forgot. 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
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
Consider a public history project on a Jim Crow era black high school in North Carolina, staffed by a white professor and three dozen predominantly white students. Add a growing level of distrust between the private, rapidly expanding university from which the project emerged, and the poor, largely non-white, surrounding community that was the home neighborhood for this high school. Read More
As I made my way through the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s five floors of exhibitions, it was the museum’s effective use of objects to convey both individual and collective narratives and big ideas about history that most impressed me. Read More
The first time I tried to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture, my friends and I got only as far as the grassy area on the Constitution Ave. side of the building. Less than a month after the museum’s grand opening in September 2016, the feeling around the David Adjaye-designed masterpiece that Sunday was electric. Read More
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