Tag Archive

covid-19

Digital community engagement in a pandemic

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Editor’s Note: Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy won the 2021 NCPH award for best new book about or growing out of public history theory, study, or practice, for either 2020 or 2021.

When we submitted final page proofs for Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy in March 2020, we had no idea what was in store for the country. Read More

Crafting Herstory

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Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of reflections from winners of NCPH awards in 2021. Sarah Marsom won honorable mention in Excellence in Consulting for her projects Crafting Herstory and #DismantlePreservation.

How women have utilized textiles as a form of activism and therefore, a radical act of self-care, has recently garnered attention through publications such as Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats. Read More

Editor’s Corner: the shadow of a pandemic

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Editors’ Note: We publish the editor’s introduction to the May 2021 issue of The Public Historian here. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members and to others with subscription access.

Several contributions to this issue in some way reflect the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on public history scholarship and labor. Read More

The role of curatorial work in our two pandemics part 2: Inside the gallery

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This is the second part of a two-part essay in which I propose five ideas for anti-racist museological work that carries a public health benefit. In Part 2 I looked at the context in which curatorial work takes place and how the institution can set the stage for effective curatorial work for social justice. Read More

The Art of (virtual) gathering: Considering audiences with purpose and intention

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For the last fifteen years I have worked as a public history digital content creator. Much of my work has been learned on the job as I engage with the tools and technologies of multi-disciplinary storytelling—and more recently, consider how technology facilitates community engagement with history in both public and intimate settings. Read More

Reflections on (relatively) rapid-response programming

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Last year, in my role as the membership coordinator for National Council on Public History (NCPH), I had the pleasure of helping put on several virtual programs in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Soon after lockdown began and public history institutions started cutting hours and furloughing or laying off staff members, at NCPH we asked ourselves, in the spirit of rapid-response collecting, what could NCPH do for struggling public historians? Read More

A Public Historian in Publishing: Lessons from Working Outside the Field

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As we grapple with the short-term (and potentially long-term) impacts of the COVID-19 health crisis on museums and cultural institutions, public historians across the field are dealing with layoffs, staff reductions, and decreased funding. And when non-history job prospects arise, offering higher salaries, healthcare benefits, and the ability to work from home, many face a difficult choice: to hold out for a position in public history or pursue opportunities in a different field. Read More

Disturbing Justice: legacies of incarceration at the Old Idaho Penitentiary

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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