Tag Archive
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
29 February 2016 – Adina Langer
exhibitions, theater, popular culture, methods, public engagement, memory, museums, oral history, music
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
19 November 2015 – Claire Hayward
In August 2015, a museum that had originally been billed as “the first women’s museum in the UK” opened instead as the Jack the Ripper Museum on Cable Street in the East End of London. ‘Jack the Ripper,’ an anonymous figure who murdered and mutilated at least five women in the late nineteenth century, has become the focus of a museum that had once been promised to represent and celebrate untold histories of women. Read More
17 November 2015 – Anna Tucker 7
As museums increasingly become spaces for engaging challenging topics, three metro Atlanta institutions joined together to address a century-old rift in the community. Using expanded audiences, a shared strategic mission, and a network of public historians, the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History forged a partnership with the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum and the Museum of History and Holocaust Education to present the exhibit, “Seeking Justice: The Leo Frank Case Revisited.” Read More
13 October 2015 – Adina Langer 4
Last December, I shared this post about my then-recent relocation from Lansing, Michigan, to Atlanta, Georgia. I wrote about my efforts to make connections in my new community and to nurture my career as a public history consultant and educator. Ten months later, I am writing from an altered vantage point; over the summer, I decided to apply for and ultimately accepted a new job as Curator of the Museum of History and Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University. Read More
09 July 2015 – Will Walker
The wide scope of new Smithsonian Secretary David J. Skorton’s interests and expertise is a good match for the sweeping breadth of the Smithsonian Institution. Formerly president of Cornell University, Skorton is a cardiologist and biomedical researcher who is also an accomplished jazz musician. Read More