Tag Archive
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
12 May 2020 – Noah Janis
historic preservation, commemoration, African American history, public engagement, plantation, community history, North Carolina, interpretation, race, slavery
A big house. Stately trees. Curious outbuildings. In 1905, Pennsylvania-born tourist Matilda Kessinger marveled at the landscape before her, “something one always reads about but never sees.” After 18 years of traveling the South, Kessinger had finally found the one place that lived up to her romantic ideals of an antebellum plantation. Read More
03 December 2019 – Anita Bakshi
Native American, methods, Indigenous People, social justice, environmental history, public engagement, memory, food, sense of place, interpretation, advocacy
Editor’s note: this is the second in a two-part series. Part 1 was published on November 28, 2019.
I first visited Ringwood, New Jersey, in February of 2018 with a group of fifteen students enrolled in my design studio class at Rutgers University’s department of landscape architecture. Read More
31 October 2019 – Nick Sacco 2
National Park Service, working group, 2019 annual meeting, methods, historiography, public engagement, sense of place, interpretation
Editors’ Note: This is one of two posts reflecting on a working group that met at the 2019 National Council on Public History Annual Meeting in Hartford, Connecticut.
In his 1957 book Interpreting Our Heritage, Freeman Tilden attempted to provide one of the first working definitions of what it means to interpret history and nature to public audiences. Read More
19 September 2019 – Allison Horrocks 1
historiography, cultural heritage, public programming, interpretation, authority, National Park Service, shared authority, public history, working group, 2019 annual meeting
For the 2019 National Council on Public History Annual Meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, I had the pleasure of coordinating the Interpreting Our Heritage in the 21st Century working group with public historian Nick Sacco. Our goal was to take a fresh look at Freeman Tilden’s foundational text, Interpreting Our Heritage (1957), and to consider whether it required “repair work,” which was the annual meeting’s theme. Read More
02 July 2019 – Tyler Rudd Putman 2
Like many of my friends and colleagues, I’ve been reflecting on the work of journalist Tony Horwitz, who died suddenly on May 27th. Horwitz’s 1998 book, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, had a profound impact on American popular culture, public history, and on my own personal and professional life. Read More
20 June 2019 – Rachel Gross
Every week throughout the summer, small groups of residents of Missoula, Montana, meet at Caras Park near downtown for history tours called “Unseen Missoula.” One important contributor to the development of the tour program has been the public history students of the University of Montana. Read More
17 March 2016 – Susan Ferentinos
I decided to become a professional historian in a campground in Ohio in the summer of 1994. I was spending the day lounging at my campsite, reading About Time: Exploring the Gay Past, by Martin Duberman, when his essay “’Writhing Bedfellows’ in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence” got me so fired up that I decided it was time to go out and do what I could to bring the past to the people. Read More
10 June 2015 – Faheem Majeed
art, public engagement, community history, sense of place, interpretation, The Public Historian, historic house museums
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a special online section accompanying issue 37 (2) of The Public Historian, guest edited by Lisa Junkin Lopez, which focuses on the future of historic house museums. The contributions in this section highlight the voices of artists who engage with historic house museums as sites of research, exhibition, and social practice. Read More
18 May 2015 – editors
methods, public engagement, sense of place, interpretation, The Public Historian, historic house museums