Ironbound Community Corporation, a non-profit community organization in Newark, New Jersey, which celebrates its 45th anniversary in 2014, began working on an archive in 2011, partnering with the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. ICC’s unique environmental justice history, which gained it an early national reputation, is important to its city, state, and the country at large. 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
Despite their widespread encounter with issues of environmental sustainability in public history practice and a heightened concern about them, most respondents (54 percent) noted that their training in the former derived from individual study or interest rather than formal education.
As part of its ongoing efforts to facilitate greater mutual accommodation between sustainability and public history imperatives and to better define the NCPH’s role in that process, the NCPH Task Force on Sustainability and Public History conducted an online survey during September of 2013. Read More
Purchasing carbon offsets, as most people probably know by now, involves giving a company an amount based on the carbon generated by your own activities. The company then invests the money in projects—building renewable energy projects, reforestation, energy efficiency measures, etc.—that Read More
I’ve written before about differences I see between education and engagement as strategies (and goals) for programming at cultural sites. Two features crucial to making programs “engaging” as well as “educational” are:
The inclusion of activities that encourage visitors to use multiple senses and their full concentration, freeing the mind from other thoughts and distractions; and
Information or activities that cause some type of positive change in individuals beyond their visit to the site.
Over the past decade a growing number of public historians have responded to debates about climate change and the need for sustainable communities by making sustainability a central focus of their professional work. These efforts were initially informal, but as Leah Glaser described in a post earlier this year, in recent years there has been a push to incorporate issues of sustainability into the mission and work of the National Council on Public History. Read More
I teach a course in material culture studies, so I am in the habit of using historic artifacts to think about our changing relationship with the environment. But nothing made this lesson clearer to me than a 1950s Hotpoint refrigerator.
When I acquired the refrigerator it was over 50 years old and looked it–there were dents, scratches, and rust decorating its exterior. Read More
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