The goal of the education department at the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum is to diversify conversations in the period rooms beyond craft and collecting to include more American history and culture. In that pursuit, we added an additional interpretive layer to the Indiana Period Room with objects of distinct cultural and popular culture significance that have led to broader interpretive changes throughout the organization. The introduction of a facsimile edition of Action Comics #1 helped staff, docents, and visitors use familiar iconography to bring more diverse stories to the Da ..read more

UNICEF Trick or Treat box from “Giving in America” at the National Museum of American History. Photo credit: National Museum of American History Editors’ Note: We publish the editor’s introduction to the May 2024 issue of The Public Historian here. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members and to others with subscription access. How can material objects help us better understand the complex, contested, and sometimes contradictory history of philanthropy? This question guides our special issue, “Material Culture as a Methodolog ..read more

If we learned anything from the 2018–2022 Long Range Plan, it’s that imagining the events of the next five years—let alone planning for them—requires a great deal of creativity. Over many months of focus groups, drafts, and revisions, the Long Range Planning Committee has worked to develop a flexible framework for a set of ambitious, but attainable, goals that build on and mutually reinforce one another. Over the past few weeks, members of the committee have shared posts exploring four of the new plan’s five pillars: Community, Advocacy, Diversity, and Practice. This post looks at the final pi ..read more

This slave deed shows the sale of a 35-year-old woman named Harriett and her three children William, Susan, and John. From this deed we learn the names of four enslaved people, as well as their presumed biological kinship to one another, which are details not typically included in most slave enumerations. Courtesy of the Buncombe County Register of Deeds, Book 23, page 218. The past decade has seen big shifts in the interpretation of slavery and enslaved people. Descendant engagement has become a standard of practice at places like Montpelier, the Whitney Plantation, and the University of Vi ..read more

From Around the Field this week: The Organization and NCPH host our joint virtual conference; the National Park Service hosts a webinar; the American Association for State and Local History announces a new book series ANNOUNCEMENTS The American Association for State and Local History provide email templates to contact your senator for America 250 funding in a recent blog post NCPH’s Curriculum and Training Committee launch their Handbook for Public Historians in Academia AWARDS AND FUNDING The National Archives Foundation is accepting applications for the 2024 Cokie Robe ..read more

The idea for the National Council on Public History began, in part, as a way to advocate for our field. In recent years the advocacy committee and NCPH leadership have responded to calls from the membership to expand the organization’s advocacy. Examples of this include both taking actions, like changes to the jobs board, and responding publicly to current events. With the new Long Range Plan (LRP), we recognized that our notion of advocacy needed to further evolve. That meant, for this plan’s advocacy pillar, it was time to put a stronger emphasis on public history as labor, something that wa ..read more

“Practice,”  is one of the five pillars of the NCPH’s Long Range Plan. This pillar consists of creating tangible resources and new programming that will better equip the organization to support the needs of the public history practitioners who are putting history to work in the world. By renewing our commitment to the practice of public history, NCPH will become the destination that professionals turn to for the support, encouragement, and resources that will empower them to excel throughout their entire careers. Lyon Municipal Archives. Image credit: Laurent Vella, Wikimedia Commons, CC ..read more

Image credit: fauxels from Pexels.com A key focus of the NCPH’s Long Range Plan (LRP) will be to continue the organization’s commitment toward creating an inclusive and diverse organization.  We commit towards reshaping the power structures of the field of public history in order to increase career access and equity for marginalized participants in the field. To paraphrase GVGK Tang, instead of “Columbusing” or “white savior narratives” that fall into co-optation, NCPH will push to highlight and support the public work already being done in marginalized communities that decolonize publi ..read more

From Around the Field this week: NCPH hosts our joint conference with the Utah Historical Society; the Oral History Association accepts applications for a research fund; the Learning Disabilities Association of America hosts a history webinar ANNOUNCEMENTS During NCPH’s 2024 annual meeting in Salt Lake City join WWII camp survivors on an one-day visit to Topaz, Utah on April 13 in attending the 81st memorial ceremony for James Wakasa, killed by a guard at the incarceration camp in 1943 The National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites have released a free, online toolkit tha ..read more

The Community Pillar of the new Long Range Plan (LRP) calls upon NCPH to develop, engage, and connect a public history community. In reviewing feedback from both members and nonmembers, two central themes stood out: a desire for more programming beyond the Annual Meeting and opportunities for mentoring. Though the Annual Meeting remains a critical piece of NCPH’s programming, not everyone is able to or wishes to attend in person. The LRP establishes a goal of having NCPH expand its programs throughout the year, both in person and online, through mini-cons, workshops, roundtables, affinity grou ..read more