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Looking toward Monterey: NCPH’s 2014 Call for Proposals

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“Sustainable Public History”
2014 Annual Meeting, National Council on Public History
Monterey, California, March 19–22, 2014

Call for Proposals

irrigating fields

Irrigating fields north of Monterey. (Photo: Richard Masoner/Cyclelicious)  Fresh water is an increasingly scarce resource in California as in much of the American West.

In 2014 the National Council on Public History will meet at the Monterey Conference Center. Monterey is one of California’s most naturally beautiful and historically rich cities. The Conference Center is adjacent to the original Presidio of Monterey, founded in 1776. And it’s a short walk to historic Colton Hall, site of the signing of California’s first constitution.  A paved bayside recreation trail leads to Cannery Row with its shops, galleries, IMAX Theatre, restaurants, clubs and the spectacular Monterey Bay Aquarium.  Monterey is a city where nature and culture intersect in fascinating and challenging ways, an ideal place to explore issues of sustainability.

The program committee invites panel, roundtable, workshop, working group, and individual paper proposals for the conference. The Call for Poster sessions will be issued in fall 2013.

 The Call for Proposals closes July 15, 2013.

At its core, sustainability means meeting the needs of the present without compromising the future. Sustainability requires us to work within limited economic and natural resources, build lasting community and cross-disciplinary relationships, emphasize quality over quantity, and elevate social responsibility. The idea of sustainability is often applied to our relationship with the environment, but also relates to the way we manage and fund historic resources. This conference will examine how the idea of sustainability can advance the field of public history and, in turn, how public history can encourage sustainability. Questions to consider include:

  • How can we use history to promote a better relationship with the environment?
  • How can we ensure that our own work is sustainable and that the collections, institutions, and knowledge we build today will endure for generations?
  • Recognizing that disparities of wealth and power undermine sustainability, how can we use history to ensure social justice?
  • How can public historians connect local actions to global developments, particularly around processes like climate change or economic decline and redevelopment?
  • How can our work inform vital public debate on these processes?

Some ideas for sessions include:

  • Interpreting the history of energy resources and their use, climate change, global warming, consumption, transportation, and the material culture of waste and reuse
  • Sustainable food – historic foodways and local food culture, historic farming practices and modern agriculture, farmers’ markets, community gardening
  • Preserving and interpreting historical resources in an era of climate change and limited resources, including resources that have themselves altered the environment
  • The role of historic organizations and preservation in sustainable planning or rebuilding – how are historic communities rebuilding after hurricanes and other disasters? How should municipalities manage use of waterfronts, flood plains, or areas susceptible to drought, etc.?
  • Reuse of historic buildings, issues of integrity, and the relationship between “green” architecture and historic preservation
  • Developing and interpreting the heritage aspects of recreational trails and environmental preserves
  • Graduate education: What do graduate students need to know about sustainability? Is the proliferation of graduate programs sustainable?
  • Incorporating public history into university-based sustainability centers or councils
  • Understanding sustainability issues in digital history projects
  • Cultivating and sustaining community engagement relationships
  • The impact of heritage tourism on communities and the natural environment
  • Race relations – neighborhood segregation and connections to environmental justice on the Monterey Peninsula and elsewhere
  • Creative ways to sustain heritage institutions; finding new audiences and new funding sources
  • Diversifying the public history profession

For more on types of sessions and guidelines for developing your proposal, visit the NCPH website.

If you have questions, please contact the program committee co-chairs or the NCPH program manager.

2014 Program Committee Co-Chairs
Briann Greenfield, History Department, Central Connecticut State University
Leah Glaser, History Department, Central Connecticut State University

NCPH Program Manager
Stephanie Rowe

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 →

3D printers and tweeting lobsters: NCPH 2013 is underway

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The public history twitterverse is an ever-livelier place, to the point that the relative absence of public historians (as at this year’s Organization of American Historians conference, held jointly with the National Council on Public History last spring but separately this year) correlates to a sharp decline in social media traffic, as David Austin Walsh reported last week.

For those not following the Twitter feed for #ncph2013, here’s a quick selection of tweeted thoughts from the first day, which featured a number of workshops and working groups and the third THATCamp NCPH.  Even from afar, it’s pretty easy to tell that Devon Elliott’s 3D printer was the star of the day! Continue reading →

2013 G. Wesley Johnson Award: How public history matters for undergraduates

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woman looking at exhibit

Oral History quotes and a video of historic images were juxtaposed with negative press clippings in the “I’m Not Who You Think I Am” section of the 2010 exhibit which examined questions of identity and perception within the Cape Verdean community. Photograph courtesy of the author.

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 Elizabeth Belanger, author of “Public History and Liberal Learning: Making the Case for the Undergraduate Practicum Experience,” which won the 2013 G. Wesley Johnson Award for the best article published in The Public Historian in the previous calendar year.

In the winter of 2011, American Historical Association President Anthony Grafton declared that “history is under attack.”[1]   In the year leading up to his presidential address, history institutions like the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services had seen their funding reduced.  In academia, history faculty members bowed under the increasing weight of a national assessment movement that required them demonstrate student learning outcomes in the major.  Across the board, in academia and outside, critics challenged the usefulness or even purpose of professional historians.

Those of us in public history would like to think that we are not intended targets of many of those criticisms.  Our graduates are not groomed only for the academy, but rather educated to work in a number of career fields including archives, historic resource management, K-12 education, and museums, to name a few.  We don’t expect that our scholars will be sequestered in ivory towers, but rather will work directly with members of the public, engaging them in important investigations of our past.  But those expectations for those in the world of undergraduate public history may not be borne out as we would hope.  My experiences with undergraduates suggest that only a few of the undergraduates who take public history courses go on to get advanced degrees in the discipline. For some of these students, the public history curriculum might consist of a single elective course, “Introduction to Public History,” which counts for their history major.  Larger colleges and universities might have a public history track within the history major, but only a small percentage offer degrees in public history.  If only a few of our students who take a public history class go on to work in the field, how do we justify public history in undergraduate programs? Continue reading →

Professional opportunities April 15, 2013

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CONF: “Corporate Voices: Institutional and Organisational Oral Histories” – Oral History Society UK, July 5-6, 2013, University of Sussex, U.K. Registration now open

FUNDING: Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History short-term fellowships for researchers using New York City archives
DEADLINE: May 1, 2013

NCH: Recent stories from the National Coalition for History
Advisory board report offers strategies to strengthen 21st century National Park Service

Obama Administration submits FY14 budget to Congress

PUB: New MuseumsEtc book catalog available

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

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report coverEditors’ 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?

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report coverEditors’ 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 →

Hey girl, let’s meet in Ottawa and get public

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multivalent narrativeYou may have noticed by now that Public History Ryan Gosling has been reappearing in select locations. His handlers, Rachel Boyle and Anne Cullen, will be presenting a paper on last year’s PHRG phenomenon as part of a panel on “Connecting Communities” at the National Council on Public History meeting in Ottawa next month, and we’ve been very happy to have their help for some advance conference promotion.  (You can get a preview of their presentation ideas here.)

PHRG won’t be the only live-tweeter at the conference, and this panel is just one of many (along with some special sessions and events) focusing on the digital dimensions of public history practice.  Below is a round-up of what’s happening: Continue reading →

What employers seek in public history graduates (Part 4): An online discussion in preparation for NCPH 2013

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binocularsAs a public historian and manager of historical research at Parks Canada for the past 12 years, I have sat on many hiring committees to hire historians, policy analysts, program officers and university students for a range of heritage and history projects based in our national office in Gatineau, Quebec.  The hiring process for the Government of Canada is highly structured with interview grids, quantitative scoring and little opportunity for those of us on hiring committees to engage in exploratory discussions when candidates have made intriguing statements.  In this context, we take special care to design our hiring process so that written exams, interviews, and reference checks support us in identifying the most outstanding candidates who can have productive careers at Parks Canada.

It is tempting to believe that a combination of education and experience is enough to turn one into a good public historian, and make one desirable to hire. However, my years of reading and listening to candidates suggests it takes so much more than that. Continue reading →