Tag Archive
17 February 2017 – Melissa Marietta
On November 9th, I put my kids on the bus and cried in the shower. I was embarrassed by my own visceral reaction to the news of the election and tried to recover for my day in the office. What I soon discovered, however, was that I was not alone in my shock, grief and anger. Read More
15 February 2017 – Rachel Donaldson 6
How closely is public history tied to academic history? Judging by the historiography of public history, it would seem that the answer to that is “very”; after all, the generally accepted view is that the field came into its own in the 1970s directed by formally trained academic historians. Read More
28 October 2016 – Cathy Stanton 2
As I’ve watched the groundswell of protest at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota over the building of a new pipeline carrying “fracked” oil from the massive Bakken oilfield, I’ve been surprised by the lack of mention of what seems to me to be one of the most striking things about this action: the fact that it’s taking place on the same reservation where Sitting Bull was killed in December 1890 by federal Indian agency police who came to arrest him as part of an attempt to suppress a wave of Indian resistance. Read More
15 September 2016 – Jonathan Schaffer 2
I recently returned from a visit to the former Jewish shtetls of my ancestors now located in present-day Ukraine. This was my second trip in less than a decade, but it felt very different from my initial experience in 2010. When I first visited, I was overwhelmed by the emotional impact of seeing firsthand once flourishing communities relegated to historical oblivion. Read More
02 August 2016 – editors
June 17, 2016 marked the one-year anniversary of the tragic mass shooting at the Emanuel AME Church, also known as Mother Emanuel, in Charleston, South Carolina. A new online exhibition published by the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI), “A Tribute to the Mother Emanuel Church,” documents the outpouring of emotion and grief for the victims, survivors, and their families. Read More
25 May 2016 – James F. Brooks
Editor’s note: We publish TPH editor James Brooks’s introduction to the May 2016 issue of The Public Historian. This digital version of the piece differs slightly from the print edition. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members. Read More
29 February 2016 – Adina Langer
methods, public engagement, memory, museums, oral history, music, exhibitions, theater, popular culture
My recent review of the Georgia Social Studies Standards, as part of my work at the Museum of History and Holocaust Education, galvanized my desire to reflect on the importance of the Broadway musical, Allegiance, which tells the story in fictionalized form of George Takei’s family’s experience in internment camps during World War II. Read More
26 February 2016 – Kristen Treen
Unlike the Confederate flag, photographs enable the viewer to look the past in the eyes with a degree of sympathy, to interpret gesture, emotional expression, and the suggestive personal proffering of military possessions through a medium with which we now express ourselves on a daily basis. Read More
24 February 2016 – Ellen Noonan 1
memory, race, The Public Historian, TPH 38.1, "Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton" responses
Lyra Monteiro is certainly right, when she notes in her review of Hamilton: An American Musical, that mainstream American culture has a lamentable tendency to embrace and retell certain stories about American history, including that of the founders, with greater frequency and enthusiasm than the many other stories that require more difficult reckonings with the past. Read More
22 February 2016 – Adina Langer
Editor’s note: Many of the issues discussed in this two-part post will be further examined in upcoming responses on this blog to “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton,” published in The Public Historian (38.1) See this introductory post about the TPH issue. Read More