The 2015 Annual Meeting of the National Council on Public History will take place from April 15-18, 2015, in Nashville, Tennessee. The conference theme is “History on the Edge.”
Edges are where exciting things happen. Some are stark boundaries, marking clear beginnings and ends, while others are blurred contact zones.
Regular visitors to the Public History Commons may have noticed that we’ve undergone a slight facelift recently. The History@Work blog, initially the sole occupant of this site, has gradually been joined by other projects: the News Feed, The Public Historian’s digital space, and now our new Library. Read More
Jennifer Tyburczy’s brilliant observation that all museums “have played an important but often overlooked role in the institutionalization of categories of sexual ‘normalcy’ and ‘perversity’” can also be applied to house museums and historic sites. House museums, as sites for interpreting private lives, are engaged in complex ways with presentations of sex and sexuality. Read More
One of my life goals has long been to read Don Quixote in the original Spanish, and I recently embarked on this monumental, even quixotic, task. Read More
Recently, I went with a group of friends to see Yoga: The Art of Transformation at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC. The exhibition includes representations of yoga practice in sculpture, painting, icons, and illuminated manuscripts across 2,000 years. Read More
Google “public history” and “climate change” and you’ll quickly realize that public historians are only just beginning to talk about how their work relates to the increasingly urgent questions posed by the earth’s rapidly changing climate. You could make a case that environmental public history is itself still in its infancy, even though it’s been more than two decades since Martin Melosi, in his President’s Annual Address to the National Council on Public History, issued a call for “environmental history [to] be a means to make the value of history better understood to the public.”[1] Read More
~ Christine Arato, Chief Historian, National Park Service, Northeast Region
After Imperiled Promise landed with something of a magnificent thud almost two years ago, I liken the NPS response to a progression along the five stages of grief articulated by Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. Read More
~ Seth Bruggeman, Associate Professor of History and Director, Center for Public History, Temple University
I’ve been fortunate to have had several points of contact with the Imperiled Promise report since its release, from attending early conference sessions with its authors to being a conversation facilitator myself and, most recently, speaking about where it may lead the NPS’s history program. Read More
Editor’s Note: On November 6, 2013, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers University-Camden convened a public forum to explore the changing presentation of history in US national parks. The gathering took as its starting point the 2011 report “Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Parks,” which has sparked other similar conversations over the past year and a half (for example, this one a year ago in Boston). Read More
A few weeks ago, I asked readers of History@Work to nominate articles on historic preservation and place from The Public Historian for a yearlong conversation in honor of the upcoming 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) in 2016. Read More
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