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Tag: public history

What might historic preservation learn from museums?

What might historic preservation learn from museums?

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Every year, the Providence Preservation Society sponsors a symposium on key issues in historic preservation. This year’s symposium, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1966 historic preservation act, asked:  Why Preserve?  From the introduction: The 2016 Providence Symposium, Why Preserve?, will bring together experts from across the nation as well as local stakeholders to examine why historic preservation matters to Providence and all communities. To be held at the iconic but threatened Industrial Trust Building, the Symposium will launch a…

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Crossing borders, or not, at the AHA

Crossing borders, or not, at the AHA

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I go to the American Historical Association annual meeting about once every ten years. The usual complaints keep me away: too big, too crazy, most of the sessions too far outside my interests. And the more specific complaint you’d expect from someone interested in public history and public humanities: too academic. Just everyone I talked to had similar complaints. Even more important: they always have. That’s one of the lessons from a fine talk at a fine session (now that…

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History museums, learning from history

History museums, learning from history

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Can museums use museum history to think about the future? Can their past successes and failures guide them? How might they find possibility and potential in the past when they need to change? I suggest that one way to do this is to look to the long history of museums. Museums have been many things. They have found many ways that museums have balanced the often-conflicting needs of audience, collections, patrons, and educational goals. Looking to this history can help…

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Sources for Teaching Public History: Michel Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)

Sources for Teaching Public History: Michel Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)

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(written for the History@Work blog and published there September 4, 2012) Michel Rolph Trouillot, historian, anthropologist, Haitian intellectual and University of Chicago professor, died this July at age 63. I first learned of his death on Twitter, from the tweets by several of my students. They had read his Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History in my class, and it had stuck with them. Silencing the Past is the only book that has been on my syllabus every…

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