TPH turns forty

01 March 2018 – James F. Brooks

Editor’s note: We publish TPH editor James F. Brooks’s introduction to the February 2018 issue of The Public Historian. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members.

Forty years ago, G. Wesley Johnson, a historian of colonial West Africa, penned the first of what would become scores of Editor’s Corners (at the time, “Editor’s Prefaces”) to launch the first issue of The Public Historian. Read More

Engaging contested memory in the classroom

26 February 2018 – Lara Kelland and Sarah McCoy

Editor’s note: In this latest post in our series on teaching with articles from The Public Historian, Professor Lara Kelland and MA student Sarah McCoy discuss their respective experiences using Christine Rieser Robbins and Mark W. Robbins’s essay, “Engaging the Contested Memory of the Public Square: Community Collaboration, Archaeology, and Oral History at Corpus Christi’s Artesian Park” (The Public Historian 36, no. Read More

Industrial heritage as agent of gentrification

19 February 2018 – Steven High and Fred Burrill

Editor’s note: This is the final post in a series on deindustrialization and industrial heritage commissioned by “The Public Historian,” expanding the conversation begun with the November 2017 special issue on the topic.

What is the role of memory and public memorializing in digesting changes so profound and traumatic [as deindustrialization]?

Preservation, rehabilitation, and interpretation as agents of transformation along the New York canal system

14 February 2018 – Brian Yates

Editor’s note: This is the sixth in a series of posts on deindustrialization and industrial heritage commissioned by The Public Historian, expanding the conversation begun with the November 2017 special issue on the topic.

An increasingly evident legacy of deindustrialization sprawls across New York State. Read More

Over-the-hill canes and ideal bodies: teaching disability history as public history

07 February 2018 – Nicole Belolan 4

Editor’s note: The post is the sixth in a series commissioned by The Public Historian that focuses on essays published in TPH that have been used effectively in the classroom. We welcome comments and further suggestions! If you have a TPH article that is a favorite in your classroom, please let us know. Read More

Five ways we can do better to respond to crises in our communities

05 February 2018 – Ashley Maynor 3

Editor’s note: This is the first post of a series that continues the conversation begun in the February 2018 issue of The Public Historian with the roundtable “Responding Rapidly to Our Communities.”

When the Virginia Tech tragedy took place in April 2007, I was an adjunct at Virginia Tech (VT) and the general manager of an art house movie theater that touted itself as the “heart of Blacksburg”—located just steps from the Drillfield, VT’s version of a quad. Read More

Afterlife of a factory

19 January 2018 – Jackie Clarke

Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of posts on deindustrialization and industrial heritage commissioned by The Public Historian, expanding the conversation begun with the November 2017 special issue on the topic. 

Living in Scotland but researching and writing about France, I’m often struck by the differences in the way in which deindustrialization figures in the public imagination in these two places. Read More

Yoga among the ruins? The challenges of industrial heritage in postwar Pittsburgh

12 January 2018 – Aaron Cowan

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of posts on deindustrialization and industrial heritage commissioned by The Public Historian, expanding the conversation begun with the November 2017 special issue on the topic. 

At its peak, the Carrie Furnace of the massive, sprawling Homestead Steel Works was a bastion of American industrial might, belching flame and smoke around the clock and employing hundreds of men in the dangerous, grueling work of producing more than one thousand tons of iron per day. Read More

Public history: yours, mine, & ours

03 January 2018 – Jenny Boulware and Elizabeth Satterfield 1

Editor’s note: The post is the fifth in a series commissioned by The Public Historian that focuses on essays published in TPH that have been used effectively in the classroom. We welcome comments and further suggestions! If you have a TPH article that is a favorite in your classroom, please let us know. Read More

Manufacturing history

01 December 2017 – Seamus O'Hanlon 1

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of posts on deindustrialization and industrial heritage commissioned by The Public Historian, expanding the conversation begun with the November 2017 special issue on the topic. 

I recently gave a guest seminar to a masters-level class in architecture and design at my university, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Read More