Create a hero. Use suspense. Set scenes. That was the advice offered by renowned food politics author Michael Pollan to a room of professional historians who struggle to sell their books to a wide audience and still rely on a model of doing history created at the profession’s birth more than 100 years ago. Read More
Happy New Year all you historians out in cyberspace! Tomorrow, Monday, January 7, at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time will mark our third monthly NCPH Consultants TweetChat. This month, we will discuss the ins and outs of crafting a solid project proposal. Read More
In Part 1 of this post, participants in a Northwest History Network professional development program called Who Hires Consulting Historians? talked about some of the “soft skills” that employers look for. Part 2 is an additional excerpt from the discussion. You can hear a podcast of the entire program here. Read More
Historians working on the Joseph Smith Papers have to navigate a balancing act between our various audiences—much like those who do contract history work. For the most part, the project has succeeded in its attempts to be balanced. In a review of the first volume of the Journals series in the journal Documentary Editing, Kenneth Minkema, executive editor of the Works of Jonathan Edwards, declared, “Readers need not raise a skeptical eyebrow when they see this edition is produced by LDS members and printed by an LDS press.” Read More
Can you believe it’s been a whole month since our inaugural consultants’ TweetChat? Our second session is scheduled for this Monday, December 3, at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. This month, we will focus on that ever-elusive goal of the self-employed: time management! Read More
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
Next Monday, November 5, at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, the NCPH Consultants Committee will debut a new monthly feature for the public history consulting community: a TweetChat. Our preliminary TweetChat will return to a topic that helped launch our presence on HIstory@Work back in the spring.
The History of Medicine in Oregon Project launched a website this month. The project was created by the Oregon Medical Education Foundation in 2001, and joined in succeeding years by Oregon Health & Science University and The Foundation for Medical Excellence, to document and interpret the history of medicine in what is now the state of Oregon and to present that history to the medical community as well as the general public. Read More
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