Tag Archive
05 December 2016 – Andrea Jones
Editor’s note: This is the first of a series of blog posts commissioned by The Public Historian on the topic of history and the interpretation of climate change in the national parks, extending the conversation on history in the national parks during this centennial year begun in its November 2016 issue. Read More
08 September 2016 – Joseph Locke and Ben Wright
The American Yawp, the profession’s first multi-authored open textbook, contains thirty chapters and almost 300,000 words. It covers everything from indigenous creation stories to Instagram. How, with historical input accelerating and the scope of scholarship expanding, could any individual or small group of historians hope to capture the breadth of American history and to do so as expansively as a textbook demands? Read More
04 April 2016 – Donna Neary 6
My transition from public history to teaching was unplanned. After twenty-five years of working for local, state and federal governments, museums, non-profits, and as a consultant, I was unemployed, cut loose, and drifting out of sight of the public history mother ship. Read More
28 March 2016 – editors
Jeff Sellers serves as the curator of education at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville, TN, and has been there since 2005. He is past-president of the Inter-museum Council of Nashville and currently serves on the National Council On Public History New Professional Award Committee. Read More
01 January 2016 – Darlene Taylor 10
race, National Historic Preservation Act, diversity, National Historic Preservation Act commemoration, creative writing, storytelling, preservation, art, public engagement, education
Editor’s note: This post concludes a series commemorating the anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act by examining a part article published in The Public Historian, describing its significance and relating it to contemporary conversations in historic preservation.
Historic preservation exists to tell stories of our journeys as a people and as a nation, but somehow along the way the stories of America’s African American, Latino, Asian, and Native American communities are erased or obscured as historians and preservationists tell the great American story. Read More
08 December 2015 – Will Walker
As I’ve read obsessively the news of campus protests these past few weeks and shared support for protesters both publicly on social media and privately in email conversations with college administrators, I’ve been challenged to think deeply about my position as both a public historian and a faculty member at a state university. Read More
01 October 2015 – Adina Langer
In a surprising turn of events, the College Board re-revised the Advanced Placement United States History curriculum framework, releasing its newest version at the end of July. While the move by the Board, which had instituted a public comment period seeking feedback on the framework back in February, is not overly surprising, the reaction among many historians and among the opponents of the original revised framework is. Read More
08 September 2015 – Jennifer Black
Last September, an undergraduate approached me to inquire about potential internship opportunities. As a new faculty member in a department with no formal public history program, there were few established connections with local community partners that I could tap. Yet the main obstacle to placing this student in an internship was her need for income; as a single mother, she had to support herself and her son. Read More
23 July 2015 – editors
With the support of a one-year Foundations planning grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the seven women’s colleges once known as the “Seven Sisters” recently launched College Women: Documenting the History of Women in Higher Education. College Women brings together digitized letters, diaries, scrapbooks, and photographs of women who attended Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, and Radcliffe (now the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University). Read More
20 July 2015 – editors 1
What constitutes success for a public history graduate program? A strong placement record? Student mastery of a set of professional skills? Or perhaps cultivation of our discipline’s habits of mind?
One might say, “It depends”–on whom you ask, when you ask them, and why you want to know. Read More