In an age of shrinking budgets and expanding new media, historic sites (physical and virtual) are struggling to prove their relevance to twenty-first century audiences. Early American museums, parks, and digital projects are particularly vulnerable as the peoples, places, institutions, and lifestyles of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americans are more distant, and thus seem less accessible and relevant to visitors and viewers in the present day. Consequently, early American public history practitioners and scholars must develop ways to bridge the gap between this more distant past and the present.
Working group members
- Kaitlin Costley
- Christopher E. Hendricks
- Molly Kerr
- Anne Lindsay
- Hilary Miller
- Julie Richter
- Lynette Taylor
- Owen Lourie
- Darci Tucker
This working group is a follow-up to the well-attended NCPH 2016 roundtable, “Early Americans and the Pursuit of an Inclusive Past.” During that session, participants brainstormed some of the unique challenges early American practitioners and scholars face in presenting and interpreting this period to the public[s]. Our working group will continue those discussions in a more focused way.
Questions we will address will include:
- What unique opportunities and challenges are posed by early American source materials?
- How can we make more explicit the connections between the more distant past and the present?
- How can we create new interpretations that more effectively link early American people, places, and artifacts to such contemporary issues as racism, gender, immigration, environmentalism, and global trade?
Outcome of working group:
To disseminate the results of our working group, we hope to use our group as a resource base of contacts through which we can collectively work together to propose panels on this topic at various academic and professional conferences. More important, we also aim to write a collaborative journal article for submission to The Public Historian.
Click here for a bibliography of resources relating to the group.