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

Lifting the curtain on living history

29 November 2017 – Andy Urban

Editor’s note: The post is the fourth 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

Deindustrialization in historical culture

15 November 2017 – Christian Wicke

Editor’s note: This post, by TPH guest editor Christian Wicke, is the first 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.  Read More

Rust, recreation, and reflection

27 October 2017 – James F. Brooks

Editor’s note: We publish TPH editor James F. Brooks’s introduction to the November 2017 issue of The Public Historian. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members.

I recently spent several weeks exploring the remnants of coal towns in southern Colorado, as well as associated public history interpretive sites like the United Mine Workers’ (UMW) memorial at the site of the Ludlow Massacre, the Walsenberg Coal Mining Museum, the Cokedale Mining Museum, and the Steelworks Center of the West in Pueblo. Read More

“A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry” in the public history classroom

25 October 2017 – Jeff Manuel

When Tammy Gaskell posted to the History@Work blog asking public history educators to recommend articles from The Public Historian that work well in the classroom, I immediately replied with several options. At the top of my list was Katherine Corbett and Dick Miller’s “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry,” which appeared in the winter 2006 issue. Read More