I learned about Museum Selfie Day on Facebook just a couple of days before the event. I made a mental note and visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History on January 22. The results were silly and less skillful than I’d anticipated. Read More
Heading to Monterey for the National Council on Public History’s annual meeting next week? Don’t forget to pack your contribution to NCPH’s first pop-up exhibit, “Seeds of Change: Public History and Sustainability”!
Generated entirely from participant contributions and built onsite at NCPH, “Seeds of Change: Public History and Sustainability” will examine how issues of sustainability converge with the work we are doing in public history. Read More
Unlike corporations that use historical images as a marketing strategy, museums, archives, libraries, and national historic sites are caretakers of history whose goal is not to distract from serious investigation but rather to promote it. We want people to understand context, to ask questions, and to dig deeper into sources. Read More
Suppose you’d never heard of @HistoryinPics, and I told you that a new social media account had grown to more than a million followers by featuring a different historical image in its feed every couple of hours.
As a public historian, you might be intrigued. Read More
I am a sucker for the drama of the Olympics. Yet while watching the ongoing Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, I have been struck once again by the continuous invocation of the past during the Olympics and–at the same time–the limited historical consciousness exhibited by the International Olympic Committee, national organizing bodies, corporate sponsors, and host cities. Read More
For quite a number of years now, I’ve been one of the people involved in gathering and disseminating news about the public history field through the various channels of the National Council on Public History: the H-Public listserv, the News Feed here in the Public History Commons, and the regular emailed updates that go out to NCPH members. Read More
I am generally not a fan of sound-bite history. In this age of information overload and attention deficits, however, I suppose we must consider ways of packaging history in short, audio-visual formats in order to reach a larger public audience. Richard Heinberg’s Post Carbon Institute video, “The Ultimate Roller Coast Ride,” is a worthy effort in this regard. Read More
Editor’s Note: This piece continues a series of posts related to the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, a collaboration of public history programs across the country to raise awareness of the long history of the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay (GTMO) and foster dialogue on its future. Read More
There actually was a thunderstorm with lightning on Thursday night in Ottawa–it’s been an unsettled spring here, as in much of the northeast. The lightning on Friday, though, came in the form of a set of quick presentations at the NCPH conference on recent and emerging digital public history projects. Read More
Editor’s note: In preparation for the upcoming NCPH conference in Ottawa, The Public Historian has commissioned a series of Ottawa site reviews, as it does annually for sites in our conference city. These “(p)reviews,” as we’re dubbing them, will inaugurate what we hope will be a growing partnership between The Public Historian and the Public History Commons. Read More
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