Conference (P)review #2: The Diefenbunker

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Jill Dolan

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.

Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum

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 →

NCPH 2013 Student Project Award: Learning from community

Posted on April 10, 2013 by editors

The congregation of Cedar Grove Baptist, one of the two churches in Terra Cotta, in the 1930s
Photo courtesy Dennis Waddell.

Editors’ Note: This series showcases the winners of the National Council on Public History’s annual awards for the best new work in the field. Today’s post is by Ellen Kuhn, Shawna Prather, and Ashley Wyatt, students at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and co-creators of the exhibit “Past the Pipes: Stories of the Terra Cotta Community,” which won the 2013 Student Project Award.

What creates a community?

In the face of significant social and economic constraints, a tightly-knit, self-reliant community developed in Terra Cotta, a segregated company town located a few miles west of downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. From the 1900s to the 1970s, members of this community worked at the nearby Pomona Terra Cotta Company, manufacturing clay pipes used to build sewer systems. Terra Cotta was the kind of place where family meant more than just blood kin; it meant giving food to the homeless man who lived in the woods nearby–even though residents had to feed their own large families on less than eleven dollars a week. It meant sharing one church building between Baptist and Methodist congregations, alternating services each week. It meant welcoming white children to play in their homes when a reciprocal invitation to play at white homes was never extended. Today, community in Terra Cotta means keeping bonds initially formed in the neighborhood alive through shared memories.

Now, these previously unheard voices are featured at the Terra Cotta Heritage Museum in a permanent exhibition that was created through a collaboration known as the Terra Cotta Community History Project. Continue reading →

Conference (P)review #1: Rideau Street Convent Chapel

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Jill Dolan

Rideau Street Convent Chapel, National Gallery of Canada, Sussex Drive, Ottawa. MARC MAYER, Director.

Georges Bouillon
Interior Architecture and Decoration of the Chapel of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Convent, 1887‑1888
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Photo © National Gallery of Canada

Passing from the busy exhibition galleries, through the arcaded courtyard with its planted beds, visitors approach the neo-Gothic interior of the Rideau Street Convent Chapel predisposed to enjoy a space of tranquility and spirituality. The chapel, or more precisely, the interior of the chapel, is an immensely popular installation in the National Gallery of Canada. It is also one of Ottawa’s great heritage success stories. The Chapel of the Convent of the Sacred Heart was rescued from demolition in the early 1970s when the Roman Catholic Grey Nuns of the Cross or Sisters of Charity, a teaching order whose premises had been on Rideau Street since the mid-nineteenth century, sold their property to a developer. Designed by the renowned – although untrained – Canadian architect-priest Georges Bouillon, the neo-Gothic chapel was unique not only in Ottawa but in Canada. It was consecrated in 1888.

Very nearly destroyed along with the rest of the nunnery’s buildings, the chapel was saved by a remarkable coalition of heritage organizations, local heritage groups and federal agencies including the National Capital Commission and the National Gallery of Canada where it would find its final home. Continue reading →

Embodying the archive (Part 1): Art practice, queer politics, public history

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Julia Brock

E.G. Crichton’s “Lineage: Matchmaking in the Archives” project connected living people with archival partners. Here, Elisa Parry with Pat Parker. Portrait by and courtesy of E.G. Crichton.

“All we have to open the past are our five senses. And memory.”

~ Louise Bourgeois

We public historians are increasing our fluency in languages. We are conversing with colleagues across the globe and across disciplines, we are ever dexterous in our work with new media, and we are constantly strengthening the ways we reach out to audiences, drawing from a language of engagement that has emerged since our field’s early days and that has blossomed in the last ten years. This emergent patois has meant more and different kinds of collaboration and models of practice, including institutional and individual partnerships with artists.

Alliances between public historians and artists are not new but are growing. Museums and archives have been inviting artists to reimagine their collections and broaden their public reach since at least the mid-1990s. As Laura Koloski argued in her recent case study of the artist-in-residency program at the American Philosophical Society Museum, there should be a development of shared language between collaborators concurrent with the rise in artist/historian partnerships.[1] In working with artists, we might begin to articulate a contemporary aesthetic of historical knowledge. How do we (and audiences) make sense of and draw conclusions about the past when it is represented in contemporary art practice or embodied by artistic performance? Continue reading →

NCPH 2013 Individual Consulting Award: What ethnography brings to public history

Posted on April 2, 2013 by cathy

Editors’ Note: This series showcases the winners of the National Council on Public History’s annual awards for the best new work in the field. Today’s post is by Cathy Stanton, winner of the 2013 NCPH Excellence in Consulting Award in the individual category for “Plant Yourself in My Neighborhood: An Ethnographic Landscape Study of Farming and Farmers in Columbia County, New York.”

In 2009, Martin Van Buren National Historic Site expanded its boundaries beyond the eighth President’s post-Presidential mansion to encompass his 200+ acre farm as well. This change meant that the national park found itself in a working relationship with a modern farm that was cultivating much of the acreage. The park had previously commissioned other studies to help support its shift toward interpreting Van Buren as a gentleman farmer as well as a politician, but the Ethnographic Landscape Study [PDF] that I was hired to produce was somewhat different. It needed to connect more directly with the present day, including the contemporary agricultural economy of Columbia County, New York, where the park is located, as well as with the burgeoning “local food” movement that the farm is part of. I jumped at the chance to work on this project and found it enormously satisfying because it gave me a chance to put into practice a notion that I’d been talking about for several years around the public history community: namely, that cultural anthropology offers an extremely useful set of tools for public historians as they work with living communities and try to articulate the importance of a sense of history in the contemporary world. Continue reading →

Project Showcase: The Health/PAC Digital Archive

Posted on March 28, 2013 by editors

The Health/PAC Digital Archive is a complete collection of the influential Health/PAC Bulletin, which was published for nearly three decades until Health/PAC closed in 1994. Full-text searchable, it amounts to a documentary history of mid- to late-20th Century American health policy and politics.

Health/PAC originated in 1967 when Robb Burlage, a co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), studied the New York City hospital affiliation agreements that gave administrative and financial control of the New York City public hospitals to private voluntary hospitals and academic medical centers. Along with journalist and activist Maxine Kenny, he developed a systematic critique of the city health system, focusing particularly on parasitic relations between medical schools and their environs; hierarchical and undemocratic health planning; and emerging neighborhood health movements to alter it.

Health/PAC staffers and authors wrote and spoke to health activists across the country on every issue from free clinics to women’s health struggles to health worker organizing to environmental justice. The organization both reported on what was going on (before there was an Internet) and debated strategies and tactics to build a more just health system. It coined the terms “medical empire” and “medical industrial complex” to capture the ways the profit motive distorted priorities in the American health care system. Even as broader political foment in the country died down by the mid-1970s, Health/PAC remained and published important pieces on women’s health, occupational/environmental health risks, incarceration, Medicare/Medicaid crises, and HIV/AIDS, among many other topics.

Students will all find these Bulletins a source of useful analysis and information. This is not only a way to learn about late 20th century health history, but to consider why certain issues continue to plague our health system.

~ The Health/PAC Archives Workgroup: Merlin Chowkwanyun, Feygele Jacobs, Ronda Kotelchuck, Susan Reverby, David Rosner, Oli Fein and Robb Burlage

Two sides of the same coin: standing at the intersection of Hollywood and history

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Jessica Cochran

Pick up a penny. On one side, we observe Lincoln as he was; on the other side, Lincoln as we have chosen to remember him. Public historians face the challenges and rewards of interpreting history for a population obsessed as much with “authenticity” as “legacy.” Films like Lincoln and Django Unchained embody both interests, and should inspire public historians to self-reflection. How can we capitalize on popular interest in historical films? How might they be incorporated into an institution’s interpretation? In what ways should public historians be proactive in planning events, organizing tours, and nurturing dialogue to engage with the issues raised by Lincoln and Django Unchained?

Daniel Day Lewis as Abraham Lincoln surveys the aftermath of battle in Lincoln. Photograph: DreamWorks II Distribution Co., LLC. Continue reading →

NCPH 2013 Project Award: The power of place within us

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Yolanda Chávez Leyva

Editors’ Note: This series showcases the winners of the National Council on Public History’s annual awards for the best new work in the field. Today’s post is by Yolanda Chávez Leyva, co-director of Museo Urbano at 500 S. Oregon, the winner of the 2013 NCPH Public History Project Award.

El Paso is a windy city. Its dusty winds blow noisily into homes and offices, tear shingles off roofs and lift trash swirling up into the atmosphere where papers and plastic bags dance with desert sands that hide the mountains beneath a hazy cloud. Most El Pasoans dread the wind but I am grateful for it because it helped me learn what a public history project could mean to a community.

One summer day in 2011, I woke up early and on a whim decided to take a drive to Museo Urbano, a community museum I co-directed in El Segundo Barrio, one of the most historic Mexican American neighborhoods in the United States, located in one of the poorest zip codes in the county. When I arrived, I noticed a group of men sitting on the stoop of the turn of the 20^th century tenement building where we were located. For over a hundred years, men have gathered on street corners in El Segundo waiting to be contracted for work so I wasn’t surprised to see them. What did surprise me was what they had to say. Continue reading →

Will digital crowdfunding work for your next project?

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Noah Goodling

Nikola Tesla’s lab building at Wardenclyffe, 1904

In August, 2012, an extraordinary thing happened: a small museum, dubbed the Friends of Science East (FSE, now the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe), which was being run out of two unused classrooms in a local high school on Long Island, began an online fundraising campaign which raised over $1 million in just over a week. The money was to be used to buy a local historical site, a laboratory utilized by the 19th century inventor Nikola Tesla called Wardenclyffe; the museum planned to repair the site and convert it into a science and technology museum to honor Tesla’s legacy. The story quickly went viral on the Internet, as journalists and bloggers asked the same set of questions: How did a small, virtually unknown museum manage to marshal such incredible resources so quickly? And what implications does this success carry for fundraising for public historians? Continue reading →

New uses for old interviews

Posted on February 13, 2013 by David Rotenstein

Left to right: Roger Gregory, Eric King, Tom Robinson, Joel (J.T. Speed) Murphy at the bar at Blind Willies. October 24, 1990. (Photo: David S. Rotenstein)

Can you remember where you worked during graduate school? To pay my way through Penn in the 1980s and 1990s I worked in cultural resource management and as a freelance writer. Although history and material culture are my true professional loves, the writing gig was the more interesting, though less profitable, job.

During a two-year break from classes–it’s a long story–I began writing a blues column for a short-lived Atlanta alt-weekly called Footnotes. Between August 1990 and March 1991, I wrote performance reviews and feature stories about musicians derived from lengthy tape-recorded interviews. I also interviewed bar owners and others to develop background material for future stories.

By the time I decided to return to Penn to finish my coursework, Footnotes had folded and I had begun writing about folk and blues music for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Charlotte Observer, and other papers and magazines throughout the United States. Always the historian, I held onto my research files and interviews, including verbatim transcripts for many of them. Continue reading →

History@Work

A public history commons sponsored by the National Council on Public History

Category Archives: Exhibits & Projects