Embodying the archive (Part 2): Lineages, longings, migrations

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Julia Brock

From the opening reception of Migrating Archives, on current exhibition at the GLBT Historical Society. Courtesy of E.G. Crichton.

The second part of this art and public history conversation series features artist E.G. Crichton. In addition to being professor in the Art Department at UC Santa Cruz, Crichton is the first artist-in-residence for the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. Her work, since she began her tenure there, has intentionally pulled the archives into public and personal forums. In her first major project, LINEAGE: Matchmaking in the Archive, Crichton positioned herself as matchmaker, connecting living persons with a specific archival collection at GLBTHS. The living participants then authored original work based on their match with and connection to the dead. Crichton recently opened her newest exhibition, Migrating Archives, on February 1, which tells stories of LGBT lives from archival collections around the world. In her responses, Crichton reflects upon her work at the GLBTHS (and the extent to which it can serve as a model for other institutions), on the matchmaking process, and on introducing forgotten histories into public memory. The full transcript of the interview can be found here.

The first post in this two-part series, linking to an interview with the Atlanta based art/idea collective John Q, can be found here.

~ Julia Brock is Director of Interpretation for the Department of Museums, Archives, and Rare Books and is curator at the Museum of History and Holocaust Education, Kennesaw State University (near Atlanta, Georgia). She received her Ph.D. in Public History from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2012.

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 Group Consulting Award (Part 2): Synergies and cross-purposes

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Anne Mitchell Whisnant

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 the second in a two-part series by Marla Miller and Anne Whisnant, two of the four authors of Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service, winner of the 2013 NCPH Excellence in Consulting Award in the group category.

In Part 1 of this post, we reviewed some of the progress that has been made in the year since we finished Imperiled Promise. Today, we raise some concerns about how two more recent high-profile NPS reports could work at cross-purposes with ours, and suggest how our colleagues can help keep the conversations about improving historical practice in the agency moving ahead.

Two NPS reports that could work against the recommendations in Imperiled Promise were issued last summer, a few months after our report debuted. Revisiting Leopold, written by a committee of prominent scientists, focused on the future of “resource management” (both natural and cultural) in the NPS. And Identifying Best Practices for Live Interpretive Programs in the United States National Park Service, completed by a team of researchers from Clemson University and Virginia Tech with backgrounds in environmental education and conservation, offered a study of immediate visitor responses to NPS interpretive programs. Both reports, commissioned (as ours was) by offices of the NPS, are receiving high-level circulation among Service leadership, and, in the case of Revisiting Leopold, the endorsement of the Director himself. Continue reading →

NCPH 2013 Group Consulting Award (Part 1): What next for Imperiled Promise?

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Marla Miller

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 part of a two-part series by Marla Miller and Anne Whisnant, two of the four authors of Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service, winner of the 2013 NCPH Excellence in Consulting Award in the group category.

We are pleased to have the opportunity to reflect on the consulting work that led to the publication of Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service. A year after the study appeared, what is perhaps most striking (and gratifying) to us is the ongoing nature of the conversation about NPS history, of which the study was a part. Our greatest hope now is to nurture and propel that conversation forward.

We knew when finishing the study that a central challenge would be getting our hard-won insights (based as they were on the voices of hundreds of NPS employees as well as members of the academic community) noticed amid the stream of other reports and initiatives addressing related issues in the agency. We have spent the months since the report’s release working to ensure that it finds purchase among its target audiences, and have been deeply gratified to see colleagues both within and beyond the NPS embrace the study and the issues it raises. 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 →

Lessons in Interpreting Controversial History at a Southern Heritage Site

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Evan Kutzler

Part of what drew me to the University of South Carolina’s Ph.D. program in history in 2010 was the opportunity to engage with controversial topics while pursuing an M.A. in public history along the way. The summer after my first year in the program, I found a part-time job with a private non-profit organization looking for someone to produce a new guidebook for an historic property it managed: a farmhouse located on a former plantation in the hills of one of the Border States. The organization had enthusiasm for site improvement but limited resources and few staff with professional training. The experience turned out to be a difficult lesson in taking professional standards as a given and interpreting controversial topics. Continue reading →

The utility of an international vision of public history

Posted on February 4, 2013 by zach

On a recent conference call that connected public history practitioners from Bangladesh, Brazil, Italy, Spain, South Africa, and the U.S., one participant remarked on the utility of replicating historic site and museum programs from different geographic locations in others. Another extolled the benefits of sharing ideas, methods, and experiences across the different regions of the world. Meanwhile I mapped these diverse localities in my mind, juxtaposing one local program with another; drawing others into the picture; putting in conversation an oral-history archive in Santiago with an aspiring one in Cambodia; comparing what to do with the former UN Special Courts building in Sierra Leone and what to do with a former site of detention and torture in Argentina; the universal linkages, I think, that connected these diverse locales.

Truth be told, I am interested in the idea of an international public history (maybe as part of a broader shift to public humanities) as much as I am with the idea, articulated in Robert Weyeneth’s recent piece in this blog, that the bedrock of public history remains rooted in the local, a particular place, a house’s history, the story of a neighborhood, the “location-specific case study.” Continue reading →

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Tag Archives: advocacy

NCPH 2013 Group Consulting Award (Part 2): Synergies and cross-purposes

NCPH 2013 Group Consulting Award (Part 1): What next for Imperiled Promise?

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

Lessons in Interpreting Controversial History at a Southern Heritage Site