Tag Archive

community history

Cold War legacies: Preservation and use at historic sites

, , , , , , ,

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of pieces  focused on Las Vegas and its regional identity which will be posted before and during the NCPH Annual Meeting in Las Vegas in April.

Cold War-era historic sites challenge public historians to strike a balance between the need for preservation and the need for continued use. Read More

Teaching Public History to Sophomores

, , , ,

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

Five ways we can do better to respond to crises in our communities

, , , , , ,

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

International Family History Workshop, Part I

, , , , , , ,

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

Project Showcase: Murals of Las Cruces Project

, , ,

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

Can Facebook help public historians build community?

, , ,

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