Tag Archive
24 January 2018 – Tim Grove
Recently I ended a trip to Canada a bit jealous that Canadians have figured out how to give history a national spotlight, something that has proven more elusive in the United States. While we do find ways to award excellence in history, they are not concentrated and diverse and on such a national stage. Read More
24 August 2017 – Dina A. Bailey
A teachable moment at the 2017 AAM Conference
In walking through the expo hall at the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) conference in May, a friend of mine and I came upon one of the vendor displays that showed the figure of an enslaved black man shackled to a pole and a grey (white) auctioneer figure standing as if to accept bids. Read More
01 June 2017 – Will Walker
As I made my way through the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s five floors of exhibitions, it was the museum’s effective use of objects to convey both individual and collective narratives and big ideas about history that most impressed me. Read More
30 May 2017 – Will Walker 4
The first time I tried to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture, my friends and I got only as far as the grassy area on the Constitution Ave. side of the building. Less than a month after the museum’s grand opening in September 2016, the feeling around the David Adjaye-designed masterpiece that Sunday was electric. Read More
13 March 2017 – editors 1
Paul Chaat Smith joined the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in 2001, where he currently serves as associate curator. With Robert Warrior, he is the author of Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New Press, 1996), a standard text in Native Studies and American history courses. Read More
06 March 2017 – Jennifer Whitmer Taylor
Believed to be the first museum of Reconstruction in the nation, the Woodrow Wilson Family Home (WWFH) reopened to the public on February 15, 2014 after being closed for nine years. Rather than focus solely on the life of Wilson, the new interpretation at the museum uses his teenage years living in Columbia, South Carolina as a lens to discuss one of the most misunderstood periods in American history. Read More
03 February 2017 – Will Walker
In January 1950, in a keynote address at the annual meeting of the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, pioneering museum studies educator Louis C. Jones illuminated the vital connection between folklore and history and its relationship to the public history community. Read More
09 January 2017 – Evan Faulkenbury 4
Several years ago, on a visit to the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina, I encountered an exhibit that asked me to participate. No, this was not high tech. No selfies, no QR codes, no downloads, just pencil and paper–yellow sticky notes. Read More
01 November 2016 – Adina Langer
Last Sunday, October 23, 2016, marked the opening of Georgia Journeys: Legacies of World War II , a new permanent exhibit at the Museum of History and Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University. The opening reception brought together educators and the interested public with nine of the twelve veterans, home front workers, and Holocaust survivors featured in the exhibit. 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