Practicing heritage justice: Helping your community decide which historic places to protect from the impact of climate change (and which to let go)

08 March 2022 – David Glassberg

Editor’s note: Our next installment of the “Our Climate Emergency” series highlights David Glassberg’s essay about historical places, climate change, and how to decide whether a site needs to be preserved or not. 

Climate disruption makes it more urgent that public historians engage with their communities to protect places significant to local history and identity from deterioration and oblivion. Read More

Oral histories battling climate change

15 February 2022 – Melody Hunter-Pillion

Editor’s note: Today we continue the “Our Climate Emergency” series with a post by Melody Hunter-Pillion that centers oral history methods as a way to battle climate change. 

“It’s different and it’s more severe . . . I’m not the scientists, but I can definitely tell you, it’s happening.”

Expanding Historic Narratives to Mobilize Around Our Climate Emergency

11 January 2022 – Donna Graves

Editor’s note: Today we share our next installment for the “Our Climate Emergency” series. Donna Graves, one of the editors of this series, investigates her role as a public historian and explores the visual nature of the climate crisis. Read More

Historic Sites and the Root Causes of Environmental Injustice

07 December 2021 – Braden Paynter

Editor’s note: This is our third installment of the “Public Historians in Our Climate Emergency” series.

Historic sites have a critical role to play in advancing environmental and climate justice, using history and place to unlock the root causes of both harm and the ongoing resistance to addressing that harm. Read More

Guidelines for historic tree preservation

05 October 2021 – Leah Glaser 2

Editor’s note: This is our first installment following an introduction by David Glassberg and Donna Graves for the “Public Historians in Our Climate Emergency” series. In Leah S. Glaser’s post, she reminds us of how trees and tree preservation play an important role in public history. Read More

Public historians in our climate emergency: an introduction

14 September 2021 – David Glassberg and Donna Graves

Editor’s note: This post begins our year-long series, Our Climate Emergency, co-edited with David Glassberg and Donna Graves. The goal of this series brings together a diverse cohort of public historians, all with different perspectives and backgrounds, to think about the role of public historians and the climate crisis. Read More

Militarizing Memory at International Boundary Marker #1

07 October 2020 – Marla Miller and Sarah A. Leavitt

The Rio Grande slows to a trickle as it turns north. It’s hardly a picturesque spot, here on the banks of one of the continent’s longest rivers. The scrub is sporadic, the trees are low, and heavily armed security forces from two nations watch you closely. Read More

A Greener Conference in the Peach State

10 March 2020 – Philip Levy, Carolyn Barske Crawford and Alena Pirok

Editors’ Note: This is the second of two posts by leaders of the National Council on Public History (NCPH)’s Committee on Environmental Sustainability. You can get involved by attending the Green Meetings Working Group session on Saturday, March 21, at the annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. Read More

How can we reduce conferences’ carbon footprints?

27 February 2020 – Philip Levy, Alena Pirok and Carolyn Barske Crawford

Editors’ Note: This is one of two posts by leaders of the National Council on Public History (NCPH)’s Committee on Environmental Sustainability. You can get involved by attending the Green Meetings Working Group Session on Saturday, March 21, at the annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. Read More

Leopold’s axe: History as a tool for conservation

09 January 2020 – Dillon Maxwell 8

In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote, “There is an allegory for historians in the diverse functions of saw, wedge, and axe.” The saw works across years to pull out “little chips of facts”; the wedge splits wood into collective views; the axe lops limbs for the “peripheral rings of the recent past.” Read More