a public history blog
For this assignment, I decided to map out sites from some of the primary sources that I have been consulting for work on a major research paper about the Settlement Movement in Philadelphia. I’m not very familiar yet with the geography of Philadelphia, and additionally, some street names and neighborhood layouts have change in the …
For my data visualization, I made the chart I wish I’d had last semester while studying the 1918 Spanish Flu Epidemic in Philadelphia. This chart visualizes mortality rates in different wards of the city of the leading causes of death in the year 1918. This makes it easy to see that although pneumonia, for …
National Jukebox: Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/jukebox/. Created and maintained by the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, Library of Congress, and Sony Music Entertainment, Inc., Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/jukebox/about. Reviewed Feb. 2017.
About a year ago, I found myself trying to make room for a family member’s spring-cleaning collection of old vinyl in an already-full record cabinet. Caught between a desire to keep these cool old records- for posterity’s sake!- and a pragmatic understanding that I would never, ever, throw on a 2.5 minute Dee Dee Sharp single, I eventually just left the record crate in front of the cabinet, where it has lived ever since.
The National Jukebox gathers comparable cobwebs in a similar scenario, tucked into a corner of the Library of Congress website. The project (clearly ambitious) took a lot of money, time, and effort to bring to fruition, and it has great potential to serve as a valuable educational resource. Unfortunately the seemingly-abandoned site doesn’t appear destined to achieve this legacy as things stand.
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It all started when I caught wind of the #museolutions Twitter hashtag. I had to get in on it- this was a resolution I could actually keep! So I set a goal for myself in 2016: “More.” How did I do? In 2016, I visited 28 new museums, historic sites, and cultural centers. What did …
On the bookshelf: Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski, eds. Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World In Letting Go?, a diverse array of public historians strive to address major questions facing the discipline in our contemporary “user-generated world.” Technological and methodological innovations, the rise of the participatory web, and shifting visitor expectations have challenged the …
On the bookshelf: Andrea Burns, From Storefront to Monument Edward T. Linenthal, “Anatomy of a Controversy” in History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past Ken Yellis, “Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me: Reflections on the History Wars” in Curator: The Museum Journal (October 2009) This week’s readings explore what can happen when …
On the bookshelf: Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment Jill Ogline, ‘”Creating Dissonance for the Visitor”: The Heart of the Liberty Bell Controversy’ in The Public Historian 26:3 (2004) Dissonance, the theme of the week, defined by Merriam-Webster: 1 a : lack of agreement; especially : inconsistency between the beliefs one holds or between one’s actions and one’s …
Last week, I wrote about the difficulty of addressing memory in the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor of Baltimore. This evening, I attended a talk at Temple by Ta-Nehisi Coates: writer, journalist, history major, and former resident of a West Baltimore neighborhood just blocks away from that corridor. Coates spoke of difficult things, including racism and structural …
On the bookshelf: Andrew Hurley, Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities Dolores Hayden, “Claiming Urban Landscapes as Public History” in The Power of Place Marla Miller and Max Page, “Introduction” in Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States This week’s readings are probably …
With the aid of my classmates, I’ve gotten my draft for the theme of “The Personal and Social Function of War Mementoes” down to 100 words and sharpened the meaning slightly. Now to revisit Serrell and see what else I can improve for next week… Many of us collect souvenirs: A postcard from the Grand …
