Week Nine: The Inclusive Historian's Handbook

 Week Nine: The Inclusive Historian's Handbook

    This week, I dove into the Inclusive Historian's Handbook to uncover different blog post style entries from various historians from across the field. Topics ranged and varied from speciality, but all had important contributions to the overall understanding of Public History by discussing methodology and ethics. To me, a student reader, this week was. particularly helpful in solidifying concepts we had covered since week one. Here, I reviewed three separate articles pertaining to Public History. 

Collaborative Practice: Bill Bryans, September 16, 2019

    Collaborative Practice is a crucial and foundational base to the methodology of Public History. Bill Bryans' take on the importance of collaboration illustrates the importance of history as a key role in civic culture; Collaboration is the direct challenging of narrative on the basis of public consensus, creating a unified identity to enrich the population. In terms of methodology, collaboration involves both shared authority and shared inquiry, with every participating member having a stake hold in memory that represents the community as a whole. In a scholarship sense, public historians must rely on other professionals due to the nature of public history; Bill Bryan's main idea understands public history as a field that requires collaboration, no matter the circumstances.
    Ethically speaking, collaboration can be rough soil for the public historian. The intersectional nature of the past can make shared memory difficult, sometimes impeding on marginalized groups and fighting against mainstream public thought. Bryan uses this thought to show the importance of the historians role in collaboration; Even with collaboration, it is the historian's job to make sure the stories and facts are represented in their entirety, determining the outcome of the project. Public historians therefore, in collaboration, still have an ultimate say in the completion of memory through publication, landmarking, and memorialization. 

Historic Preservation: Priya Chhaya, June 4, 2019

Placemaking, a term that refers to when a historian's work becomes embedded in a community, is argued by Priya Chhaya to be a key factor of inclusive preservation; Following the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), a paradigm shift from historical preservation of places to people became central to the public historian. Chhaya highlights the creation of the Preservation for People report in the effort to make preservation more inclusive and democratic. Historical preservation and it's evolution from places to people has sustained the practice of memory recollection, shifting to a narrative that is designed to protect the original community and it's history.
    Storytelling, as Chhaya describes, is a leading discipline in the intersectionality of public history. Chhaya showcases their effectiveness by highlighting the work of the San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation and their cultural maps, illustrating the connections among people, places, and the past. The article is more recalling the. active shift of historic preservation to a more "radical approach," engaging in public histroy more than contemporary history. The author advocates for the memory of the current population rather than the recollection of the past through colonized sources and elitist mentality.  

View from the Field: Equity-Oriented and Anti-Racist Curatorial Practice: Elena Gonzales, December 23, 2020

    Circling back to the issue of collaboration, curatorial practice must result in works that are accessible, diverse, and inclusive to represent all stakeholders. Historical sites, museums, and public memory have a long history of marginalizing minority memory through power structures of curation; The past two centuries consist of Native American and Black identities fighting for a position in the historical narrative through exhibits and the creation museums. Elena Gonzales' work is mostly a history of the curatorial practice and activism against racial bias in museum displays. Her work describes the proposed and already implemented changes needed in the American museum systems in curation methodology.
    Notably, Gonzales promotes the idea of inclusive curation by means of Diversity, Equity, Accessibility and Inclusion (DEAI). Her explanation of the acronym encompasses the idea of including the minority in thought, culture, race, and gender in the entirety of the curation process. Whether its an exhibition, a site dedication, or the creation of an archive, the curation team should be purposeful in encompassing diversity; Gonzales makes the point that museums have never been neutral, making the push for an anti-racist campaign all the more feasible and needed. Through curation, museums are a national representation of how culture and history is represented.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week Five: Shared Authority, Shared Inquiry, and Radical Roots (cont'd)

 Week Five: Shared Authority, Shared Inquiry, and Radical Roots (cont'd) What is "Shared Authority"?      Described by Michael Frisch in the late 1980s, a "Shared Authority" is a suggestion that "something  'is' that in the nature of oral and public history, we are not the sole interpreters. Rather, the interpretive and meaning-making process is in fact shared by definition” (Clavin, 216). Sharing Authority is not so much a technical process, but rather a personal challenge to make sense of the past through emotion and reasoning; Frisch emphasizes an connection to identity, family history, and personal experiences (Clavin, 217).      Part of Frisch's discussion on Shared Authority partially refers to the understanding of celebration vs. commemoration; Commemoration refers to a competitive history that result in identity issues, whereas celebrations are used in the glorification and memorialization of people and events (Frisch, 219). This idea...
Read more

Week Two: The History Harvest as Community-Engaged, "Hands-On" History

Week Two: The History Harvest as Community-Engaged, "Hands-On" History The History Harvest: Origins & Methodology     The "History Harvest" and it's origins have been in debate since the first one originated in the early 2000s, with Dr. Patrick D. Jones and Dr. William G. Thomas, III, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln coining the term in 2010. The History Harvest began out of a teaching goal to educate students on the collection of the people's history. Educators came up with a solution to begin a collaborative relationship with communities and their history that wasn't on the basis of extracting information, but rather on the collection and digitalization of communal memory and history (University of Nebraska at Lincoln, 2010).      Emerging into the 21st century, we live in a world that is increasingly marked by the evolution of the digital age and experience a narrative of the victors and popular, minimizing the story of the communal experienc...
Read more

Week Ten: Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice / Historians as Consultants and Advisors

 Week Ten: Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice:  Historians as Consultants and Advisors Overview      Thomas Cauvin's  Public History: A Textbook of Practice serves as a basic guide to understanding methodology, practice, and conversations surrounding the practice. of historical preservation in the modern day. Published in 2016, Cauvin's work represents the changing nature of the professionalization of public history by understanding the active role public history plays in the creation, preservation, and enhancement of public and political identity of national groups. Understanding how historians act as consultants and advisors helps us understand the role in which "radical public history" has in the life of everyday history and community activism on a national stage.  Shared Inquiry in Representative History      Chapter 12 titled "Civic Engagement and Social Justice" helps readers understand the ongoing role in which ...
Read more