Wave of the future or budget cut tsunami? Evaluating technical conference solutions

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What do you do when suddenly your panel goes from six people to two? When the U.S. government sequester and tightened institutional budgets mean that your carefully crafted slate of experts can’t make the trip to Ottawa to present in person? This is exactly the situation in which Adina Langer and I found ourselves, mere weeks before this year’s NCPH conference. We had been planning our panel, on the ways that different sites present stories of September 11th, since before the call for proposals last July. We had recruited panelists from the National 9/11 Memorial Museum, the Pentagon Memorial, and the Flight 93 Memorial Park. We had discussed and planned and collaborated.

A screenshot of the Google Hangout interface, courtesy of Adina Langer

A screenshot of the Google Hangout interface, courtesy of Adina Langer

And then…one by one, our panelists began breaking the bad news. They couldn’t make the trip. What to do? Everyone was still excited to talk about their work and their audiences, but we couldn’t fund them to get to Canada. Adina and I decided to turn to some of the same technology that had allowed us to collaborate on planning the panel in the first place, and see if we could make the show still go on. Continue reading →

Project Showcase: Museum on the Move

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airstream trailer

This 1954 Airstream trailer is the home of UL Lafayette’s Museum on the Move. Photo: Museum on the Move.

Building upon our innovative approaches to teaching and practicing Public History, the History Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette is proud to announce an exceptional project called Museum on the Move. Public History students will outfit a vintage Airstream trailer (left) with an interpretive exhibit that will then hit the road to take history directly out of the classroom and to the public. Exhibits will be created on a rotating basis and require the melding of two courses and a cohort of students.

The first course will be a traditional history course where students conduct research projects geared toward the planned exhibit. The next phase of the project is for a Museum Studies course where students re-craft the research done in the first class to create exhibit components that they will install in the trailer. Once the exhibit is up and rolling, the trailer will be sent out on short runs to venues around the state where the students’ (and the program’s) work will be on display.

The first planned exhibit will be on Louisiana Women and it is being timed to coincide with the publication of Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 2 (University of Georgia Press) being edited by the department’s own Dr. Mary Farmer-Kaiser. Students currently enrolled in her course on Louisiana Women are pursuing their studies with an eye toward the future exhibit and are excited to be a part of something with such potential for hands-on success. In the end, it is our intent for the program to teach students the methods and value of creative approaches to practicing history and to establish a recognizable product in the form of rotating exhibit topics in a compelling package. The trailer has been purchased, the class is underway, and everything is coming together.

~ Bob Carriker, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Project Showcase: “Inside a Senate Investigation: Watergate 40 Years Later”

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senators voting

Senators Howard Baker (R-TN) and Sam Ervin (D-NC) cast votes during the Senate Watergate Committee hearings of 1973. Seated behind the senators is the committee deputy counsel Rufus Edmisten, whose oral history interview is included in the collection of the U.S. Senate Historical Office. (Photo courtesy Senate Historical Office.)

During the month of May 2013, on www.senate.gov, the U.S. Senate Historical Office looks back 40 years to one of the Senate’s most important investigations. The Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, more commonly known as the Watergate Committee, questioned the president’s closest advisors about the break-in and cover-up at the Watergate office complex and other “illegal and improper campaign practices” that occurred during the presidential campaign of 1972.

Hearings began in closed session on March 28, 1973, and then continued in open, televised sessions on May 17. Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina chaired the committee, with Tennessee’s Howard Baker serving as vice-chair, ably assisted by their majority and minority counsels, Sam Dash and Fred Thompson.

Under the guidance of Senators Ervin and Baker, and backed by bipartisan support of the Senate, the Watergate Committee produced much of the evidence that led to the August 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon. The Watergate Committee also established an important legislative legacy.

As the Watergate Committee continued its work, the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration prepared for an anticipated impeachment trial. Assisted by long-time Senate parliamentarian Floyd Riddick, the Rules Committee held its own set of executive session hearings to lay the groundwork for a presidential impeachment trial.

Since its first inquiry in 1792, Congress has conducted hundreds of investigations, fulfilling a constitutional oversight responsibility while serving as the eyes and ears of the American public. During the Civil War, Congress created the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to oversee wartime activities of the Lincoln administration.  Throughout its history the Senate has investigated a wide array of issues, including organized crime, the defense industry, and Wall Street banking practices, revealing some of its most interesting stories and personalities, but few investigations have proved to be as consequential as Watergate. For further information, contact historian@sec.senate.gov.

~ Betty Koed, Associate Historian, United States Senate

The telephonic heart: A “machine autopsy” in Ottawa

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allen ginsberg poem on iphoneThis spring, I’ve been teaching an urban anthropology class at Tufts University. In the class session before I left for the National Council on Public History conference, we talked about how digital technologies have become ever more interwoven with urban experience. The session before that was on sites of urban violence and memorialization. Although the course has a global focus, I frequently use Boston as a case study, since that’s where we are. We talked about the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 and the Cocoanut Grove Fire of 1942 and—because Marathon Weekend was coming up—about how people interact digitally with urban spectacles, including sports, and how the layers of memory embedded in iconic places and sports events filter into our contemporary uses and understandings of them.

Then I went to Ottawa for the conference and, like many people there, ended up fixated on something between a disaster movie and a cops-and-robbers drama unfolding at a distance, mostly via my Facebook feed on my iPhone. Mobile phones were not only a way to keep up with the story of the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath, but part and parcel of the story itself, with spectators’ cell-phone photos and video circulating virally once the suspects in the bombing were pinpointed. Throughout the day when much of the city was on “lockdown,” I was receiving text alerts from Tufts telling me how to “shelter in place.” Everything we’d been covering in my class was playing out on my phone’s tiny screen almost simultaneously with the actual events in Boston.

So there was a lot to talk about when I went back to class the following Monday. And all of it made Vittorio Marchis’ dissection of a telephone at the conference particularly fascinating for me. Continue reading →

Seventh monthly Consultants’ Corner TweetChat

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Happy spring, all you consultants out in cyberspace! Monday, May 6th, will bring you our seventh monthly Consultants’ Corner Tweetchat. The chat will be held at 4:00 p.m. EST and the topic will be “international perspectives in historical consulting.” We hope you can join us, and we especially welcome consultants from nations outside the United States.Twitter_Bird

To participate in this and future TweetChats, you will need to sign up for a Twitter account by going to www.twitter.com. When it’s time for the chat, go to http://tweetchat.com/ and enter #phconchat as the chat hashtag. Alternatively, you can work with a special Twitter browser like TweetDeck. Let us know if you have any questions in advance of the chat, and we hope to see you there on Monday!

~ The Consultants’ Corner Editorial Team (@NCPHconsultants)

Impressions from the OAH

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Michael AdamsonThe weekend of 12-14 of April, I took the opportunity to attend the Organization of American Historians meeting San Francisco—a mere 35-mile BART ride from my home—to see how visible public history was on the program one year after the OAH and NCPH held a joint meeting in Milwaukee.

In quantitative terms, I counted nine sessions and two workshops devoted to public history (out of a total of about 80 sessions). The OAH Committee on Public History sponsored a session (a roundtable on filmmaking), a workshop (on doing oral history), and a public history reception at the California Historical Society. The OAH Committee on National Park Service Collaboration also sponsored a session and a workshop. I’m not sure what these metrics mean in terms of recent trends, as this was my first stand-alone OAH meeting since 2002. (I don’t recall a public history presence at that meeting—though I must confess that I didn’t attend it wearing my public history hat.) Let’s stipulate that attention to public history within the OAH has been trending up over the past decade. But in absolute terms, the OAH appears to have invested a meaningful amount of resources in elevating the profile of public history within the organization, if the 2013 meeting is indicative. Continue reading →

Queenston on and off the field: A Q&A discussion with Adam Shoalts and Cathy Stanton

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reenactors

Reenactors at the bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Queenston Heights. Image courtesy of Andrew Amy.

Editors’ note:  This conversation responds to Adam Shoalts’ report on the October 2012 bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Queenston Heights  and is part of the collaborative coverage of War of 1812 commemoration in History@Work and The Public Historian. Read more here.

Stanton:  Your piece really captures the playfulness and sense of adventure and discovery that reenactments often offer to participants.  Yet at the same time, “officialdom” of various kinds is usually involved in staging a big event like this.  How much of the success of this event, for you, was due to the more improvisational moments (like your exploration of the cliff path or your infantry partner’s impulsive firing at “Brock”) and how much resulted from the more scripted and managed aspects of the day?

Shoalts:  While it is true that I am a former employee of the government agency that oversees Queenston Heights and that I have been involved with quite a number of reenactments, I confess that much of the higher planning that goes into staging these events remains a mystery to me. Continue reading →

2013 Lightning Talks

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London Works exhibit photoThere actually was a thunderstorm with lightning on Thursday night in Ottawa–it’s been an unsettled spring here, as in much of the northeast.  The lightning on Friday, though, came in the form of a set of quick presentations at the NCPH conference on recent and emerging digital public history projects.  This year’s “Lightning Talk” projects included: