Tag Archive
04 January 2017 – editors
As we mark the end of a tumultuous 2016 and begin what promises to be an eventful new year, History@Work’s editors are reflecting on the posts that prompted the widest readership and dialogue among our community:
Annette Gordon Reed, Hamilton the Musical: Blacks and the Founding Fathers
Matthew Exline, Looking for a Job in Public History: An Outsider’s Perspective
Cathy Stanton, Does the National Park Service have a Culture Problem? Read More
11 November 2016 – editors 6
How should public historians respond to the new reality of the incoming political leadership in the United States? Representative democracy in the United States has survived the bitter partisanship of the Early Republic, the Civil War, corruption and scandals, the rise of international fascism, and the paroxysms of protest against the Vietnam War, so it is likely to endure. Read More
28 October 2016 – Cathy Stanton 2
As I’ve watched the groundswell of protest at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota over the building of a new pipeline carrying “fracked” oil from the massive Bakken oilfield, I’ve been surprised by the lack of mention of what seems to me to be one of the most striking things about this action: the fact that it’s taking place on the same reservation where Sitting Bull was killed in December 1890 by federal Indian agency police who came to arrest him as part of an attempt to suppress a wave of Indian resistance. Read More
23 August 2016 – editors
Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site recently launched Prisons Today: Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration, the first major museum exhibit to tackle this civil rights issue.* Prisons Today asks open-ended questions and encourages dialogue among visitors about America’s past and present prison systems. Read More
02 August 2016 – editors
June 17, 2016 marked the one-year anniversary of the tragic mass shooting at the Emanuel AME Church, also known as Mother Emanuel, in Charleston, South Carolina. A new online exhibition published by the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI), “A Tribute to the Mother Emanuel Church,” documents the outpouring of emotion and grief for the victims, survivors, and their families. Read More
11 July 2016 – editors
The Chicago History Museum (CHM) and Breakthrough, a community-based organization that provides social services on Chicago’s West Side, have launched Forty Blocks: The East Garfield Park Oral History Project. Focused on the 1970s to the present, this collaborative effort examines daily life in East Garfield Park, an African American neighborhood that has been marginalized in contemporary Chicago and neglected in the recent historical record. Read More
25 March 2016 – editors 1
A personal perspective on the Flint water crisis
My thoughts on the Flint water crisis stem from a personal perspective, as well as my academic interests in deindustrialization, African American history, and heritage tourism. When I was two years old, my dad was offered a job as a reference librarian at the University of Michigan-Flint. Read More
04 March 2016 – editors
Environmental Racism and Lead Poisoning in Flint
I study environmental justice movements, both contemporary and historical. Lead (along with asthma) has been a central urban environmental health issue in the US that hits racial minorities and working-class people particularly hard. Lead is often thought of, for that reason, as an example of environmental racism. Read More
08 December 2015 – Will Walker
As I’ve read obsessively the news of campus protests these past few weeks and shared support for protesters both publicly on social media and privately in email conversations with college administrators, I’ve been challenged to think deeply about my position as both a public historian and a faculty member at a state university. Read More
19 November 2015 – Claire Hayward
In August 2015, a museum that had originally been billed as “the first women’s museum in the UK” opened instead as the Jack the Ripper Museum on Cable Street in the East End of London. ‘Jack the Ripper,’ an anonymous figure who murdered and mutilated at least five women in the late nineteenth century, has become the focus of a museum that had once been promised to represent and celebrate untold histories of women. Read More