Last Friday, November 2, 2012, National Park Service personnel, public historians, academics, and graduate students from the Northeast met at the Massachusetts State Archives in Boston to discuss the Organization of American Historians’ recent report Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service (2011).  Co-sponsored by the University of Massachusetts History Department and Boston National Historical Park, the “Critical Conversations” on the OAH report were both spirited and timely given the divisiveness of the long presidential campaign and the reverberations of Hurricane Sandy.

As the title of the OAH report suggests, the NPS now sits at crossroads, tasked with preserving, managing, and interpreting hundreds of sites across the United States, yet hampered by structural, financial, and institutional constraints that weaken the practice of history within the agency. Continue reading →