public history – Omnia History

Reflections on #NCPH2019

Wow, what a conference. I met and reconnected with so many public historians doing fantastic work and had many opportunities to reflect and work on my own complicity in oppressive structures that shape our field. I also spoke to many fellow practitioners who are struggling to make a living or secure health insurance as they cobble together jobs or rely on partner incomes. There are too many stories of public historians lacking support when facing sexual harassment (see Dr. Lyra Monteiro’s Twitter thread or Hope’s blog post) and others who risk losing their jobs while trying to do ethical public history within inflexible institutions.

I was disappointed to hear a few well-established public historians I respect dismiss some of these concerns as “career anxieties” or “entry level” folks needing to “pay their dues.” This is not an issue relegated to a few nervous emerging professionals—the widespread inability to earn a living doing public history affects the ability of a diverse range of people to access and sustain involvement in the field. Labor conditions also profoundly affect the (lack of) racial and gender equity within the field. Addressing public history as work is a critical link within the broader repair work discussed at #NCPH2019.

Omnia History’s Guide to NCPH 2019

Rachel Boyle and Hope Shannon co-authored this post.

Like many of you, we’re gearing up for our trip to Hartford for the National Council on Public History’s 2019 annual meeting. We’ll be there by Wednesday afternoon and look forward to immersing ourselves in the camaraderie and paradigm-shifting conversations so typical of this conference. This is our favorite annual meeting and our intellectual home base and we’re so thankful to everyone involved in its organization. We’re especially grateful to the NCPH staff, program and local arrangements committees, sponsors, and other volunteers who build such a welcoming space year after year.

One of our favorite things about the NCPH annual meeting is the plethora of ways to meet and engage other conference attendees outside of traditional sessions. NCPH does a great job making these events as meaningful and productive as everything else on the conference program. Below, we share some of the non-session events that we’re most looking forward to and offer some thoughts on why you should include an ample number of these in your conference schedule. This guide is not meant to be an endorsement of these particular events or a slight to those we didn’t choose—we just want to highlight some of what makes NCPH’s annual meeting a highlight of our year!

6 ways small cultural organizations can generate discussions about voting rights

The time is ripe for small cultural institutions to think about how they can engage their communities in conversations about voting, elections, and civic disenfranchisement. For one, we’re in the early stages of the next presidential election cycle here in the United States. We’ve seen several democrats announce that they intend to run for the democratic nomination in advance of the 2020 election and I think it’s safe to say that this presidential race will capture more attention than any other election in modern history. And even if we weren’t approaching a presidential or congressional election, we’re almost always at the beginning, middle, or end of some election. Here in Chicago we’re facing a mayoral and aldermanic election in a few weeks, hot on the heels of the November midterms.

In addition to the near-constant stream of election cycles, we’re now less than a year away from the beginning of the 19th amendment’s centennial. Celebrations of this important historical moment provide a framework cultural institutions can use to highlight issues related to suffrage, disenfranchisement, and human rights, past and present, in their local communities. Voter disenfranchisement has always been a serious human rights issue, and it’s especially pressing now as a number of states with voter identification laws on the books are attempting (and succeeding) in making these laws even more stringent and restrictive.

These moments are important because they present small cultural groups, including local historical societies and museums, with a number of opportunities to bring people together to think critically about the role voting, elections, and disenfranchisement play in their lives and in the lives of those around them. We never need a reason to talk about the connections between past and present– this can happen whenever, regardless of current events– but it’s particularly important that we provide historical context for and facilitate conversations about issues sitting at the top of the news cycle. High on that list right now are what I mention above– voting, elections, and civic disenfranchisement.

Shaking things up (literally) in small history institutions

A couple of weeks ago, I presented about outreach and community engagement for small history institutions at the National Council on Public History’s first-ever Twitter Mini-Con, “(Re)Active Public History.” My presentation dealt with some of what I’ve discussed here in the past– mainly the important role these groups play in their towns and neighborhoods and how they can shuffle or modify existing priorities to ensure they play active and essential roles in the communities they serve.

More specifically, we considered why so many small history groups have, historically, prioritized collections-based work above other projects, how to adjust this model in the present to make more room for outreach- and community-based work, and how to involve constituents in a way that ensures and demonstrates institutional relevance. Some of the issues we covered were how to start this conversation, who to bring to the table and how to get them there, how to identify institutional priorities (and, similarly, how to identify what can be eliminated), using these self-reflective processes to build bridges between people across diverse communities, and how to make hard, self-reflective discussions part of an institution’s regular agenda.

I’m particularly grateful to the people who stayed until the end to engage in a rich and thought-provoking discussion about the realities of being a history and/or museum professional trying to do this work on the ground. I’m including our conversations here as a kind of part 3 to my two earlier blog posts (part 1, part 2) about community outreach and engagement in small history institutions.

Continue reading “Shaking things up (literally) in small history institutions”

A Relevant Surrogate? Interrogating the Digital Exhibit as a Form

Kristin Emery and Rachel Boyle are longtime friends, colleagues, and collaborators in the humanities who frequently reflect and strategize together. Here they grapple with the value of digital exhibits by considering their potential educational value, intended audiences, and the realities of online habits.

Rachel: I’ll be blunt: What is the point of a digital exhibit? Is it just unsuccessfully shoving an analog idea (physical exhibits) into a digital space? If I am looking for a cultural activity out on the city I might stop by a gallery exhibition, but if I have downtime on my computer or phone, there is no way that I will purposefully explore a digital exhibit. I might try to learn something new by going down a Wikipedia hole, settling in for a #longread, or following a social media thread, but I have never once sought out a digital exhibit. And I’ve proudly curated several! Hence the crisis—why am I building something I would never seek out myself?

Kristin: When I took the first iteration of Kyle Roberts’s “Digital Media for Public History” class at Loyola University Chicago in 2012, we spent the first several class sessions on the “digital versus analog” debate. A 3-D model of the Lourve could never replace the experience of going to the museum; but at least it gives those who may never be able to actually visit a chance to experience the museum in part. Digitized collection items can be viewed with the help of enhancing software that might allow for more complete analysis. You get the picture. We also talked in those early sessions about the concept of hypertextuality (lol that is literally an example of hypertextuality) and the exciting opportunities for digital exhibits to use the concept to break down the constraining linear nature of physical exhibits.

But here we are, six years later (practically an eon in internet time), and your question remains: what’s the point of a digital exhibit? Continue reading “A Relevant Surrogate? Interrogating the Digital Exhibit as a Form”

How you can use history to “effect social change” at home right now

I’m traveling to New Orleans in early November to present on the “Effecting Social Change through the Humanities” lightning round panel at this year’s National Humanities Conference. I’ll talk about the role local history has played in local change in the past and how to harness local history to effect change at home in the present. Since the conference is in November, and I’ll be preparing for it at the same time as the final stretch to the midterm elections, I can’t help but think about this and other panels at the conference in the context of what’s happening nationally right now. So many of us, myself included, are desperate for good news, for a wave of blue victories across the country, for any sign that attacks against human rights and progressive policies and will slow-down or stop.

Continue reading “How you can use history to “effect social change” at home right now”

Place of Protest: Curating a Digital Exhibit

I am proud to announce the launch of a brand new digital exhibit: Place of Protest: Chicago’s Legacy of Dissent, Declaration, and Disruption. Featuring collection material from the members of the Chicago Collections Consortium, the exhibit covers fifteen events spanning nearly 150 years to explore how protesters in Chicago occupied space with their bodies, voices, and possessions. Visit the digital exhibit by clicking here or read on to get my take on the curatorial process, see what ended up on the cutting room floor, and learn more about upcoming events.

Continue reading “Place of Protest: Curating a Digital Exhibit”

What does “lost” history really mean?

James Farmer speaking outside Hotel Theresa, 1965. Image courtesy Library of congress.

I sometimes hear people who talk about the past refer to “lost” histories. Unsurprisingly, this phrase seems to come up most often in discussions about histories of women, people of color, LGBTQ people, impoverished people, and other historically-marginalized groups.

I’ve always found this rather strange. Describing a particular kind of history as “lost” gives a pass to the forces that led to its obfuscation. Gaps in historical knowledge occur because people in power ignore or devalue the ways the groups they marginalize shape change over time. People in power sometimes destroy historical records in a deliberate way and/or manipulate information so as to maintain and strengthen their control over others and elevate their own accomplishments. They do so until challenged in some way, but in the meantime they have the means by which to secure their legacies and influence the historical record. Continue reading “What does “lost” history really mean?”

The Conundrum of Capitalism and Public History

We have sometimes worked for supervisors, stakeholders, or institutions who are more interested in palatable fables than rigorous truths—with some feeling as though our ethics must be compromised lest we lose our job. Many fight the good fight at great emotional, mental, and financial cost—a cost especially compounded for women, people of color, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized folks. We may feel pressured to pander to tourists and coddle local lore rather than rock the boat. We might pass by or abandon important community collaborative projects that don’t have financial backing. We sometimes work second night jobs at restaurants to keep working day jobs at the museum and pay off student loans. Under pressure from anxious students, parents and administrators, we cater to the notion that public history leads to good jobs. We lead quiet lives of desperation in full knowledge that despite our historically-informed perspectives, we are not outside capitalism’s peculiar power to obscure inequity, patriarchy, and racial discrimination as “natural market forces.” Like everyone else, we are trapped in its snare.

Check out this recent blog post on NCPH@Work co-authored by Rachel Boyle examining the fraught realities of doing public history work within the confines of capitalism.

Prioritizing Outreach at Local History Institutions, Part 2 of 2

This post is the second of a two-part piece about collections, outreach, and reshuffling priorities at local history institutions. Click here for the first post, “Rethinking Collections at Local History Institutions.”

In June, I wrote about the problematic tendency of many local history groups to prioritize the collection of historic artifacts and documents above vital outreach and community-building work. This needs to change. This isn’t the case for all of these groups, of course– there are some whose staff and volunteers use history to bring people from diverse communities together and into their institutions, and a wonderful handful who use their collections to help with these efforts– but there are many more who neglect this work.

Local history groups that have not yet prioritized outreach need to do so as soon as possible. For one, we need these groups to provide opportunities for local change-makers to come together to discuss the applications of historical knowledge to present-day problems. But beyond that, demonstrating relevance in this way can help local history groups survive a critical stage in their life cycles– the point at which their founder or founders have left the organization and current leadership has to consider how to step forward without the original cohort’s momentum and influence.¹
Continue reading “Prioritizing Outreach at Local History Institutions, Part 2 of 2”