Tag Archive

public engagement

Sacrificing comfort for complexity: Presenting difficult narratives in public history

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Editor’s Note: This piece continues a series of posts related to the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, a collaboration of public history programs across the country to raise awareness of the long history of the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay (GTMO) and foster dialogue on its future. Read More

Energy Efficiency + Climate Change: A Conversation with the National Trust for Historic Preservation

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Public historians are communicators. We tweet, blog, analyze, interpret, and document events for a variety of different publics. We make connections, linking widespread evidence into a single narrative.

It is that skill set that we are looking for at “Energy Efficiency + Climate Change: A Conversation with the National Trust for Historic Preservation” on Thursday from 8:30-10 a.m. Read More

What is "sustainable public history"?

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Sustainability is an increasingly attractive concept that resonates across disciplines and many facets of public life. A quick Google search turns up over 69 million results, including “sustainable development,” “sustainable seafood,” “sustainable performance,” “sustainable capitalism,” “sustainable travel,” and my favorite, “sustainable dance club.” Read More

Free range kids: museums at play

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EDITOR’S NOTE:  This post as it originally appeared on March 10 was a draft version, posted in error.  The correct version appears below.  We apologize to the authors and to our readers for the confusion.

Picture, for a moment, children of all ages loose in your museum; free to grab, change, move, and build with whatever their hands happen to come across. Read More

An experiment for generation Y: "aMUSE: Exhibits Unleashed"

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Like many community museums, we’ve had a difficult time encouraging and maintaining a young adult audience. We know that members of generation Y love information, history, museums, and artifacts. We also know that members of generation Y sometimes like to focus more on presentation style, technology, and media than on content. Read More

@HistoryinPics brings history to the public. So what's the problem? (Part 2)

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Continued from Part 1.

Unlike corporations that use historical images as a marketing strategy, museums, archives, libraries, and national historic sites are caretakers of history whose goal is not to distract from serious investigation but rather to promote it.  We want people to understand context, to ask questions, and to dig deeper into sources.  Read More

The uses of the past at the Olympics

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I am a sucker for the drama of the Olympics. Yet while watching the ongoing Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, I have been struck once again by the continuous invocation of the past during the Olympics and­–at the same time–the limited historical consciousness exhibited by the International Olympic Committee, national organizing bodies, corporate sponsors, and host cities. Read More