Category Archives: Exhibits & Projects

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 →

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:

Project Showcase: “Closed for Business”

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webpageThe Historical Society of Pennsylvania has launched “Closed for Business,” a new digital history project focused on the early years of the Great Depression and the December 1930 failure of a large Philadelphia bank, Bankers Trust Company.

The project was part of a larger effort funded by the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation to draw attention to the Society’s 20th-century collections and to build expertise in developing online interpretive projects that follow international Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards. Continue reading →

Conference P(review) #4: Canadian War Museum

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Editor’s note: In preparation for the upcoming NCPH conference in Ottawa, The Public Historian has commissioned a series of Ottawa site reviews, as it does annually for sites in our conference city.  These “(p)reviews,” as we’re dubbing them, will inaugurate what we hope will be a growing partnership between The Public Historian and the Public History Commons.  Further online post-conference reviews will follow later this spring;  we invite readers to comment on these posts as they appear.

Canadian War Museum, 1 Vimy Pl, Ottawa. Tim Cook, Acting Director of Research; Andrew Burtch Curator of “Eleven Women Facing War” and “Khandahar: the Fighting Season;” Peter MacLeod, Curator, Pre-Confederation Canada. Open weekdays between 9 A.M. and 5 P.M., and Thursdays until 8 P.M. Free admission after 4 P.M.

Just a short walk from the Delta Hotel in Ottawa, the Canadian War Museum offers conference attendees an opportunity to see award-winning architecture and experience two photographic exhibits (one open until April 21), in addition to the museum’s expansive exhibits on war and conflict from a Canadian perspective. Visitors can easily spend four or more hours touring the galleries. Below are a few of the highlights that may be of interest to NCPH members.

The Canadian War Museum stands out on the barren land of LeBretton Flats, once covered with a thriving working-class neighborhood, felled by “urban renewal.” Now, nearly forty years later, mixed-used development is beginning to fill in the space. (Photo courtesy of Jo McCutcheon.)

The Canadian War Museum stands out on the barren land of LeBretton Flats, once covered with a thriving working-class neighborhood, felled by “urban renewal.” Now, nearly forty years later, mixed-used development is beginning to fill in the space. (Photo courtesy of Jo McCutcheon.)

The Canadian War museum moved from its earlier home in the former Archives building to a new purpose-built facility in 2005.[1] The new museum building is a stunning piece of art designed to push visitors to consider the grim reality and devastating consequences of war. Architect Raymond Moriyama is himself a casualty of conflict; at the age of twelve his family was interned in the interior mountains of British Columbia for several years, along with other Japanese-Canadians living on the country’s west coast. He told Maclean’s magazine in 2005 that his design for the war museum began with a sketch of the tree house he built as a boy in that internment camp. The tree house was both a refuge and a place of contemplation and regeneration during a time of conflict, and Moriyama wanted to bring these elements to the design of the War Museum.[2] The building’s low profile resembles a hideout or bunker, while the tall fin rising at the east end is reminiscent of the prow of a ship (the small windows on it spell out “Lest We Forget” in Morse code). Most of the building’s windows are on the east side, facing the sunrise – a symbol of hope – in keeping with Moriyama’s theme of regeneration. Inside, the low ceiling in the entrance hall, combined with the slanted and stark concrete walls, create a slightly claustrophobic and disorienting feeling. This is a building designed to make visitors slightly uncomfortable even before they get to the exhibit galleries. Continue reading →

Conference (P)review #3: Vodou at the Canadian Museum of Civilization

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Editor’s note: In preparation for the upcoming NCPH conference in Ottawa, The Public Historian has commissioned a series of Ottawa site reviews, as it does annually for sites in our conference city.  These “(p)reviews,” as we’re dubbing them, will inaugurate what we hope will be a growing partnership between The Public Historian and the Public History Commons.  Further online post-conference reviews will follow later this spring;  we invite readers to comment on these posts as they appear.

Vodou.  Dr. Mauro Peressini, Ravel Beaucoir-Dominique, and Didier Dominque; Curators.  The Canadian Museum of Civilization.  November 15, 2012 –February 23, 2014

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Rèn Kongo (Queen of the Congo)
Concrete
This representation of Rèn Kongo is rich in symbols. The lwa bears the word “Guinée” (Guinea) on her right breast, a reference to a mythical ancestral Africa. Her left breast has been cut off, like that of an Amazon. Rèn Kongo is portrayed as a female warrior holding a machete, evoking the female cavalry and infantry units of the Kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin). The children at her feet represent the human race, over which she reigns.
© MCC/ CMC, Frank Wimart

On the bank of the Ottawa River directly across from the Parliament of Canada sits the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC)—soon to become the Canadian Museum of History.  Representing the nation’s social, cultural, and community history, it is Canada’s largest and most popular cultural institution.[1] While many of the permanent galleries and exhibitions are undergoing renovation, the collaborative Vodou exhibit will be the one permanent feature open to the public for the coming year.  Produced in collaboration with Haitian and Montreal diaspora communities, the Musée d’ethnographie de Geneve, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Fondation pour la presentation, la valorisation, et la production d’oeuvres culturelles haïtiennes (FPVPOCH), this exhibit makes use of Marianne Lehmann’s extensive private collection of Vodou artifacts to re-interpret Haitian Vodou history, beliefs, and culture to a contemporary Canadian audience.[2] Continue reading →

Conference (P)review #2: The Diefenbunker

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Editor’s note: In preparation for the upcoming NCPH conference in Ottawa, The Public Historian has commissioned a series of Ottawa site reviews, as it does annually for sites in our conference city.  These “(p)reviews,” as we’re dubbing them, will inaugurate what we hope will be a growing partnership between The Public Historian and the Public History Commons.  Further online post-conference reviews will follow later this spring;  we invite readers to comment on these posts as they appear.

The Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum. HENRIETTE RIEGEL, Executive Director.

There is an aura of kitsch about the Diefenbunker, from the cutesy pun of its name, to the ubiquitous sea foam green shade of its unmistakably 1960s décor. As your tour guide will tell you, the brief warning period ushered in by the advent of ground-based nuclear missiles meant that the bunker was somewhat obsolete by the time construction finished, lending a contrasting absurdity to the awe of its labyrinthine massiveness. Nevertheless, the space evokes some of the most deeply-felt realities of the Cold War, and the sheer terror of nuclear conflict. Located at the edge of Carp, a reasonable drive from downtown Ottawa—although probably not reasonable enough to outpace the aforementioned missiles—Canada’s Cold War Museum opened to the public in 1998. Initially a solely volunteer operation, the site now has full-time staff members and follows a mandate to “increase throughout Canada and the world, interest in and a critical understanding of the Cold War.”[1]  Continue reading →