Tag Archive

public engagement

Riding the 1919 Chicago Race riots: biking across divides to confront the past

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Editor’s note: This essay is part of a series of reflective posts written by winners of awards intended to be given out at the NCPH 2020 annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. The Chicago 1919 Project, organized by the Newberry Library, was the 2020 recipient of the Outstanding Public History Project Award. Read More

A Virtual Walking Tour in Decatur, Georgia: Linking Race, History, Community

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I teach a seminar on ethnography and community engagement in Goucher College’s graduate historic preservation program. Last year, I took my students to Baltimore’s Otterbein neighborhood, a historic district and one of the nation’s earliest urban homesteading neighborhoods.[i] The COVID-19 pandemic pushed our summer term online and that meant no class field trip to Baltimore, an annual program tradition. Read More

“What Could It Have [Been] Then?”: Reflecting on the origins and historiography of a plantation historic site

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A big house. Stately trees. Curious outbuildings. In 1905, Pennsylvania-born tourist Matilda Kessinger marveled at the landscape before her, “something one always reads about but never sees.” After 18 years of traveling the South, Kessinger had finally found the one place that lived up to her romantic ideals of an antebellum plantation. Read More

Managing social media, doing public history

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This summer, a team of National Council on Preservation Education (NCPE) interns oversaw the National Historic Landmarks Program’s social media accounts and explored firsthand how the creative chaos of shared social media management can be harnessed as a productive outlet for engagement and interpretation. Read More

Excavating subterranean histories of Ringwood Mines and the Ramapough Lunaape Nation, part 2

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Editor’s note: this is the second in a two-part series. Part 1 was published on November 28, 2019.

I first visited Ringwood, New Jersey, in February of 2018 with a group of fifteen students enrolled in my design studio class at Rutgers University’s department of landscape architecture. Read More

Excavating subterranean histories of Ringwood Mines and the Ramapough Lunaape Nation, part 1

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The Ramapough Lunaape Turtle Clan have called Ringwood, New Jersey, home for centuries. The surrounding landscape features iron mines, Native American rock shelters, and a forest that provides food for hunters and foragers. But it also contains a stew of different chemical toxicants from the former Ford manufacturing plant, deep pockets of contaminated soil, streams that now flow with orange water, and the Ringwood Mines/Landfill Superfund Site. Read More

Meeting people where they are: Reinterpreting Freeman Tilden

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Editors’ Note: This is one of two posts reflecting on a working group that met at the 2019 National Council on Public History Annual Meeting in Hartford, Connecticut.

In his 1957 book Interpreting Our Heritage, Freeman Tilden attempted to provide one of the first working definitions of what it means to interpret history and nature to public audiences. Read More

Interview with Kayla Duncan of the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition

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Editors’ Note: When the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) opened the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, in April 2018, grassroots Community Remembrance was built into the project’s DNA. This Q&A between History@Work lead editor Adina Langer and Kayla Duncan discusses the work of the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, an organization in Fulton County, Georgia, dedicated to earning an EJI-designated monument for Fulton County.  Read More

Science and disability Q&A: Part 2

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Editor’s note: this is the second in a two-part series based on a conversation between our Digital Media Editor, Nicole Belolan, and Jessica Martucci, a researcher at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  

NB: How do you think this project defines or redefines disability, and who does the defining? Read More

Science and disability Q&A: Part 1

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Editor’s note: this is the first in a two-part series based on a conversation between our Digital Media Editor, Nicole Belolan, and Jessica Martucci, a researcher at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Nicole Belolan: Before we delve into the Science and Disability project, tell us about the Science History Institute (including its recent name change) and your position. Read More