Tag Archive
23 October 2023 – Paige Figanbaum
The tourist perception of Las Vegas is often limited to its iconic neon lights, or recently, the Knights hockey team winning the Stanley Cup championship. While The Strip has played a significant role in shaping the city, it tends to overshadow Las Vegas’ rich history and community. Read More
22 September 2023 – Sara Zarrelli and Guy Hermann
Editors’ Note: This essay is by the recipients of the National Council on Public History 2023 Excellence in Consulting Awards-Group Award Honorable Mention. The award was presented to Guy Hermann, Sara Zarrelli, and Jacques Brunswick of Museum Insights for their Connecticut Landmarks Portfolio Assessment. Read More
02 August 2022 – Sarah H. Case
advocacy, interpretation, The Public Historian, slavery, historic preservation, commemoration, historic house museums
Editors’ Note: We publish the editor’s introduction to the August 2022 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. Read More
16 June 2022 – David Rotenstein
On the morning of April 1, 2022, I was among throngs of remote researchers who visited the National Archives and Records Administration website to access data from the newly released 1950 Census. I had waited thirteen years to answer one research question: Who was the Black woman working in a family home that I had first researched in 2009? Read More
07 June 2022 – Diana M. Katovitch 7
The Pennhurst Haunted Asylum and the Pennhurst Museum, operated by Pennhurst LLC in collaboration with the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance (PMPA), exist side-by-side on the grounds of the shuttered Pennhurst State School and Hospital in Spring City, Pennsylvania. The sites might seem to have opposite goals: one to frighten and entertain, the other to educate about past wrongs. Read More
24 May 2022 – James W. Conroy and Katrina N. Jirik
Many countries have erected memorials to the state-sponsored suffering of their citizens, such as the Gedenkstaette memorial in Dachau, Germany and Freedom Park in Pretoria, South Africa. For more than 150 years, millions of Americans with developmental disabilities were segregated, isolated, neglected, and abused in overcrowded, state-funded institutions, as poignantly detailed in disability rights scholar Burton Blatt’s Christmas in Purgatory. Read More
01 July 2021 – Sarah Marsom
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. This is part two of a two-part Q&A about #DismantlePreservation (part one was published on June 24, 2021). Read More
24 June 2021 – Sarah Marsom
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. This is part one of a two-part Q&A about #DismantlePreservation. Read More
25 March 2021 – Jacqueline Hudson 3
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of reflections from winners of NCPH awards in 2021. Jacqueline Patrice Hudson is the winner of the NCPH new professional award.
As a young child, I thought visiting my grandparents in Chicago was a fun adventure each summer when my younger sister Jephreda and I got the chance to ride a plane by ourselves (accompanied by an airline employee, of course). Read More
29 December 2020 – Mary Biggs
Editors Note: How do historical sites reckon with landscape within interpretive plans? Mary Biggs joins us to explore how one former plantation space in North Carolina uses the landscape on which formally enslaved people worked and lived to reconceptualize visitor experience at that site. Read More