(Editor’s Note: This post is the second in a series on the Amsterdam Museum. To read the first post, click here.)
“The stadiums are getting fuller and the churches emptier.”
This observation, from Amsterdam Museum director Paul Spies, served as the inspiration for the museum’s intriguing, controversial, and, at times, humorous temporary exhibit Football Hallelujah!Read More
Hardball history that places historians at the center of politics, advocacy, and activism can be a difficult journey, but it can also be inspiring. My introduction to public history coincided with the 2006 unveiling of a controversial downtown revitalization plan in the city of El Paso, Texas. Read More
“You know who has money to help you.” I responded to this truth by listing three millionaires from whom I would not accept funding for Museo Urbano, the public history project housed in the Department of History at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Read More
Doing public history, in all its diverse manifestations, requires certain specialized habits of mind. One of the most vital but also the most mysterious is synthesis.
When I begin work on an exhibition, such as the one I’ve been developing for the past two years, I read as many books and talk to as many people as I can, and then–I wait. Read More
At Ohio Wesleyan University, I teach an upper-level medieval history course, “Constantine to Charlemagne.” This is an undergraduate class, with 18 students of varying backgrounds. The course addresses a time period (ca. 300-850) often slandered as barbaric and backwards, so my goal is for students to see the richness, texture, and vibrancy of the period along with the political and economic troubles that befell certain areas. Read More
2014 saw huge steps forward in representations of LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning) lives in public history on both sides of the Atlantic. Projects have been launched in both the United States and the United Kingdom that aim to reveal national histories of LGBTQ lives, highlighting the ways that international conversations about approaches to public history are developing and impacting positively on the practice of public history. Read More
(Editor’s note: This post is the first of a two-part series looking at the Amsterdam Museum. The second post can be found here.)
As a certified History Nerd and lover of cities, one of the first things I do when I arrive in a new city is check out the local history museum. Read More
Muralist and activist Mike Alewitz has finished his tribute to the labor and social justice movements, an imposing four-panel painting titled The City at the Crossroads of History–but the museum it was commissioned for doesn’t want it.
The Puffin Foundation, a grant maker that frequently supports politically left artists, engaged Alewitz to create the mural for a new gallery at the Museum of the City of New York. Read More
As a graduate student of public history who specializes in early America, I spend a lot of time thinking about borders and peripheries, not just the temporal and spatial borders of British North America, but the figurative borders within which the “traditional” American experience is circumscribed. Read More
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