Tag Archive

politics

Oral histories of the land: Creating community dialogues on the environment

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delaware-river-farmlandDoing 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

Refining the republic: A discussion on history in the National Park Service

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report coverLast Friday, November 2, 2012, National Park Service personnel, public historians, academics, and graduate students from the Northeast met at the Massachusetts State Archives in Boston to discuss the Organization of American Historians’ recent report Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service (2011). Read More

Mormons and midwives, or A tale of two shuttle rides

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I got my first sense of how present the Mormon past is in Salt Lake City on the shuttle ride from the airport to the convention center where the American Association for State and Local History conference was taking place.  The friendly woman in the seat behind me explained that she and her family were in town for the semi-annual Mormon general conference, and pointed out that you can still see the sweep of the founders’ vision in the extraordinary four- or even six-lane width of most of the major streets.  Read More

Reflecting on Texts: Steven Lubar on Trouillot's "Silencing the Past"

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NOTE:  This post is part of a new and, we hope, semi-regular series in which public history educators share insights and observations about their use of “classic” texts in the public history classroom.

Michel Rolph Trouillot, historian, anthropologist, Haitian intellectual and University of Chicago professor, died in July at age 63Read More

Preservation conversations: Looking for broader partnerships at the National Trust

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There are two sides sides to historic preservation. On one side preservationists work to save places, using community character and history to enhance the quality of living through transportation, smart growth, and sustainability. On the other we are seen as obstructionist, the party of “no,” and a limiting factor to the development and modernization of what a community wants to accomplish. Read More

Project Showcase: Nursing Clio

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Nursing Clio is a collaborative blog project that ties historical scholarship to present-day political, social, and cultural issues surrounding gender and medicine. Men’s and women’s bodies, their reproductive rights, and their health care are often at the center of political debate and have also become a large part of the social and cultural discussions in popular media. Read More

Letters from Chile: A photo gallery

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In addition to the photos that have accompanied Zach McKiernan’s “Letters from Chile” series this spring, there have been many more that we didn’t post with the articles, but which we’re including here in a visual addendum to the series. All are by the author unless otherwise noted. Read More