Are We There Yet? Children, History, and the Power of Place |
2010 |
3734 |
History is about perspective, looking back to recognize that nothing under the sun is truly new. History is about empathy, seeing the humanity in distant figures and bringing their experiences to life. History is about context, recognizing that our a... |
Art, History, and Science Museums: A Cross-Cultural Conversation. |
2006 |
1507 |
The past century has witnessed the rise of distinct museums for art, history, and science. That trend has accelerated in the past twenty-five years with the dramatic expansion of science museums and the increasingly specialized museology of art and p... |
Hearing Voices in Open House: If These Walls Could Talk. |
2008 |
2446 |
Open House: If These Walls Could Talk tells probably the smallest story ever told at the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS). It focuses on a single, ordinary house on St. Paul's gritty East Side and the people who made that house home—from the German... |
Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World. |
2011 |
2151 |
The traditional expertise of the history museum seems to be challenged at every turn. Web 2.0 invites ordinary people to become their own archivists, curators, and designers as they organize images on Snapfish, identify artifacts through Flickr, post... |
Local Lessons in Letting Go. |
2012 |
750 |
Near twenty years ago, I arrived in Appleton, bright-eyed, to be curator at the Outagamie County Historical Society. Brimming with excitement about my first day at my first real museum job, I stepped into...chaos. The museum had been without a curato... |
Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1942-1942, edited by Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov. |
2007 |
1304 |
Gordon and Nemerov contend that Lomax sought out vestiges of old-fashioned African American culture and turned away from documenting the full complexity of the contemporary Delta. [...] in The Land Where the Blues Began, Lomax laments that gospel mus... |
Music and the Making of a New South, by Gavin James Campbell |
2005 |
970 |
Filene reviews Music and the Making of a New South by Gavin James Campbell. |
O Brother, What Next? Making Sense of the Folk Fad |
2004 |
4887 |
After O Brother, Where Art Thou? spurred a surge of interest in all
things folk, I got calls from friends coast to coast. Since I wrote
a book about folk revivalism, they assumed I’d be thrilled to see
that the film and soundtrack had once ... |
Object Lesson: Open House. |
2003 |
1383 |
On the snowy afternoon when we first knocked on Pang Toua Yang's door, he thought he had won something. Actually, we were there to tell him that his house is going to be the subject of a new Minnesota Historical Society exhibit: Open House will tell ... |
Our Singing Country: John and Alan Lomax, Leadbelly, and the Construction of an American Past. |
1991 |
7020 |
IN THE EARLY 1930s, JOHN A. LOMAX LOST HIS BANK JOB TO THE depression and his wife to illness. Needing to make a fresh start, Lomax returned to the vocation he truly loved, collecting American folk songs. In 1933 he persuaded the Macmillan publishing... |
Passionate Histories: ‘Outsider’ History-Makers and What They Teach Us. |
2012 |
5406 |
Even as museums and sites struggle to attract audiences and bemoan the public’s
lack of interest in history, people working outsidemuseums and universities, without professional
training, and often without funding, are approaching history in ways t... |
Searching for Florence |
2001 |
2095 |
For me, it was the eyes. With her hand resting easily on the piano, the girl gives the camera a piercing look of pride and self-possession, with just a hint of defiance. That look stirred up deep feelings in me--about music, about daughters (especial... |
Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940, by Jane Becker |
1999 |
1600 |
It is tempting to say that in Selling Tradition: Appa- lachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 930-1940 Jane Becker gives us a glimpse of an- other world-the Appalachian Mountains in the era of the Great Depression, when mountaineers pursued... |
Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life |
2001 |
2743 |
David Glassberg's book is a searching exploration of the divide that separates academic history from the sense of the past that all of us carry wherever we go?our sense
of having ancestors, of being from someplace, of being
connected to traditions.... |
Settlement and Survival: Building Towns in the Chippewa Valley |
1997 |
2420 |
One photograph appears in two different exhibitions at the Chippewa Valley Mu- seum. The difference in its treatment suggests both how far this emerging regional museum has come and the challenges it still faces. The photograph shows a team of horses... |
Small Stories in the Big Picture: Open House: If These Walls Could Talk. |
2006 |
1442 |
When is a small story a big story? At the beginning of 2001, the Minnesota Historical Society set out on a five-year-long quest to find out. The journey culminated this January in the opening of a major new exhibition at the Minnesota History Center,... |
Students Connect with History ‘Insiders. |
2008 |
818 |
Twenty-three-year-old Lisa Zevorich
came to graduate school with a talent
for historical research—seeking out
documents, weighing interpretations,
crafting arguments. This semester she
has been honing a new skill: listening.
Zevorich and seven ... |
Training Public Historians: Academy and Reality. |
2006 |
1345 |
Professionalization builds structure that solidifies a discipline; professionalization erects walls that bar outsiders. Professionalization elevates understanding to a higher plane; professionalization draws practitioners into rarefied air that precl... |
Whose History? Who's History? |
2008 |
1168 |
How can Greensboro come to terms with its tangled racial history? One story at a time may be the answer. Increasingly, historians are recognizing that ordinary people’s life stories can open up a richer understanding of the past and can invite audien... |
Windows to the Past: People, Place, and Memory in Downtown Greensboro. |
2012 |
1237 |
Have you ever wondered what a
favorite downtown spot was twenty-five,
fifty, or even one hundred years ago? Six
museum studies students at the University
of North Carolina at Greensboro have spent
the last year-and-a-half trying to figure out
j... |