Editors’ Note: This series showcases the winners of the National Council on Public History’s annual awards for the best new work in the field. Today’s post is by Cathy Stanton, winner of the 2013 NCPH Excellence in Consulting Award in the individual category for “Plant Yourself in My Neighborhood: An Ethnographic Landscape Study of Farming and Farmers in Columbia County, New York.”Read More
We are interested in applying a new theoretical approach to public history, and we need your help.
The theory is called “threshold concepts.” Jan Meyer and Ray Land (both education specialists) developed threshold concepts as a way of explaining how students grasp (or don’t grasp) particular disciplines. Read More
Can you remember where you worked during graduate school? To pay my way through Penn in the 1980s and 1990s I worked in cultural resource management and as a freelance writer. Although history and material culture are my true professional loves, the writing gig was the more interesting, though less profitable, job. Read More
Academic interest in public history is growing, and an increasing number of history departments are looking for a public historian to train students for public history jobs. But what does it mean to start a public history program? Is it as simple as hiring a PhD with a field in public history and telling them to get going? Read More
On a recent conference call that connected public history practitioners from Bangladesh, Brazil, Italy, Spain, South Africa, and the U.S., one participant remarked on the utility of replicating historic site and museum programs from different geographic locations in others. Another extolled the benefits of sharing ideas, methods, and experiences across the different regions of the world. Read More
Doing public programs is never easy, but it is the most immediate and rewarding way to engage directly with your audience. This past semester, the Cooperstown Graduate Program’s oral history project experimented with a new type of public program. Taking our cue from the statewide “Community Conversations” sponsored by the New York Council for the Humanities, which also provided funding for our project, we decided to use our large archive of oral histories as the basis for a series of dialogues about important environmental topics. Read More
There’s a show on the website Hulu you may have seen, called “Up to Speed” with host Timothy “Speed” Levitch and director Richard Linklater. Speed is a licensed tour guide—kind of—advising us that “to truly travel is to appreciate the beauty in the unexpected.” Read More
Historians working on the Joseph Smith Papers have to navigate a balancing act between our various audiences—much like those who do contract history work. For the most part, the project has succeeded in its attempts to be balanced. In a review of the first volume of the Journals series in the journal Documentary Editing, Kenneth Minkema, executive editor of the Works of Jonathan Edwards, declared, “Readers need not raise a skeptical eyebrow when they see this edition is produced by LDS members and printed by an LDS press.” Read More
In my years as a historical consultant, I did several projects for agencies such as the National Park Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Much like the church for which I now work, these agencies are interested in their past, but also are sensitive to criticisms that have been levied against them by opposing groups, such as environmental organizations. Read More
Some time ago, I had the opportunity of hearing a presentation by Daniel Walker Howe, a historian who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his book What Hath God Wrought: A History of the United States, 1815-1848. In the course of the seminar, Howe made a plea for academic historians to stop ignoring the general public in their work, declaring that it was time for historians to stop talking only to each other and to engage the larger public. Read More
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Editors’ Note: This series showcases the winners of the National Council on Public History’s annual awards for the best new work in the field. Today’s post is by Cathy Stanton, winner of the 2013 NCPH Excellence in Consulting Award in the individual category for “Plant Yourself in My Neighborhood: An Ethnographic Landscape Study of Farming and Farmers in Columbia County, New York.” Read More 
