Scratch the surface and women’s history is everywhere in Las Vegas

14 May 2018 – Joanne Goodwin

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

The casino and entertainment industries in Las Vegas have used women’s bodies to sell the city since the 1950s. Read More

Terra incognita: Navigating life as the only professionally-trained historian at work

16 April 2018 – Tony Pierucci

There’s a gap between intellectually understanding something and actually grasping it and all of its ramifications. Two days into my new job in 2014, I fell headlong into that yawning space between intellectual understanding and grasping and spent the next few months scraping my knees and elbows clambering back out again. Read More

Q: “Sir, would you like a history of this monument?” A: “F**k You!”

21 March 2018 – HIstorians for a Better Future 6

Members of Historians for a Better Future planned to encounter many personalities along the sidewalk when we set up in front of the Women of the Confederacy monument at the State Capitol building in Raleigh, North Carolina, on September 8, 2017. Read More

Disrupting institutional power: Imagining a regional model for public history education

09 March 2018 – Denise Meringolo

As the number of public history programs continues to grow, public history educators compete for students, grants, and partners. We flood cultural organizations with interns and redundant projects. Budgetary uncertainty forces educators working in state systems to make competing claims of primacy and excellence, pitting our programs against one another. Read More

Engaging contested memory in the classroom

26 February 2018 – Lara Kelland and Sarah McCoy

Editor’s note: In this latest post in our series on teaching with articles from The Public Historian, Professor Lara Kelland and MA student Sarah McCoy discuss their respective experiences using Christine Rieser Robbins and Mark W. Robbins’s essay, “Engaging the Contested Memory of the Public Square: Community Collaboration, Archaeology, and Oral History at Corpus Christi’s Artesian Park” (The Public Historian 36, no. Read More

Teaching Public History to Sophomores

09 February 2018 – Evan Faulkenbury

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

Over-the-hill canes and ideal bodies: teaching disability history as public history

07 February 2018 – Nicole Belolan 4

Editor’s note: The post is the sixth 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

Public history: yours, mine, & ours

03 January 2018 – Jenny Boulware and Elizabeth Satterfield 1

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

Lifting the curtain on living history

29 November 2017 – Andy Urban

Editor’s note: The post is the fourth 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 Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry” in the public history classroom

25 October 2017 – Jeff Manuel

When Tammy Gaskell posted to the History@Work blog asking public history educators to recommend articles from The Public Historian that work well in the classroom, I immediately replied with several options. At the top of my list was Katherine Corbett and Dick Miller’s “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry,” which appeared in the winter 2006 issue. Read More