Tag Archive
30 April 2018 – Jim McGrath
Five years ago I was watching the Boston Marathon in Coolidge Corner with my brother Brian. He had recently moved to the city and had never experienced a Marathon Monday, so the lively spectators and runners in Brookline—combined with the perfect spring weather—seemed like a fine introduction to this Boston tradition. Read More
12 April 2018 – James F. Brooks
2018 annual meeting, digital history, Las Vegas Series 2018, memory, environment, conference, The Public Historian
I hope NCPH members and The Public Historian subscribers will enjoy our second foray into digital special editions tuned to the current moment in public history. Our Monuments, Memory, Politics, and Our Publics issue of last September responded to public debates around the removal of “Lost Cause” monuments then in the news. Read More
05 April 2018 – Kate Johnson and Marie Pellissier
Our working group, “Crossing the Line: Facilitating Digital Access to Primary Sources,” started with a simple premise. If, as Sheila Brennan states, digital humanities projects are not “public” projects merely by virtue of their being accessible online, how then can we craft them so as to place public engagement at the center? Read More
10 January 2018 – Pamela Curtin and David Trowbridge 5
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
08 January 2018 – Jessie Cortesi
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
20 December 2017 – Carrie Knight 2
Since 2012, the Seward Family Digital Archive Project, under the aegis of the University of Rochester’s Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation Department, has endeavored to digitize portions of one of its most utilized collections—the papers of former U.S. Secretary of State and New York governor William H. Read More
11 August 2017 – Paul Ringel 1
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
08 August 2017 – Kate Fox
Popular culture has recently taken a renewed interest in gardening—food gardening in particular. In 2014, Smithsonian Gardens created Community of Gardens, a crowdsourced initiative to preserve our vernacular garden heritage. Now, the free and newly-released Community of Gardens app allows people to easily explore the stories, videos, and images in the Community of Gardens digital archive in a mobile-friendly environment, as well as locate stories and gardens nearby. Read More
14 July 2017 – GVGK Tang
The Semiotics of Sex: A History of Queer Identity Politics is a multi-platform digital history project that explores various methodologies for historicizing queer activism and identity for public consumption. Through a commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the world’s first queer political protest, the project demonstrates that digital tools are a vital resource for public historians interpreting queer history. Read More
18 May 2017 – Betsy Newman 1
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