Public History News |
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| With Power for All: Energy & Social Change in Massachusetts |
The 2009 Mass History Conference, "With Power for All: Energy & Social Change in Massachusetts," will be held on Monday, June 8, 2009 from 9:00 - 4:00 pm at the Hogan Campus Center, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA. Join us for a daylong exploration of the harnessing and uses of energy in the history of Massachusetts. For more information, download the detailed program here. |
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Prizewinning author Cathy Stanton offers new course
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Cathy Stanton, an adjunct research associate to our program and an author whose recent book The Lowell Experiment, won the best-book prize from National Council on Public History, is offering a Spring 2009 course at Hampshire College on the "Politics of Urban Heritage." Grad students from UMass are welcome to contact her if they wish to participate. Her course description reads as follows: What would it take to reenvision contemporary modes of heritage display in a more radically democratic, critical, and socially inclusive way? And what might such projects look like? This course will examine the proliferating realm of heritage display in urban places (museums, historical parks and trails, official and vernacular monuments and art, place-marketing campaigns, waterfront redevelopment, adaptive reuse and historic preservation projects) and will examine the problematic relationship between the often- marginalized groups who “have” heritage and the tourists, students, and others who can be attracted to view and experience it second- hand. Drawing on films, field trips, and a multidisciplinary literature from anthropology, cultural studies, history, tourism and museum studies, the class will analyze the underlying logic of this type of cultural expression and will explore how it manifests itself in the complex, overlapping environments of urban neighborhoods. |
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Jon Berndt Olsen hired as newest faculty member in Public History & New Media! |
Jon Olsen is a 2004 PhD from UNC-Chapel Hill with a specialty in public history and collective historical consciousness in modern Germany. He has taught at William & Mary and Texas Tech, and was most recently a fellow at George Mason University's Center for History and New Media, one of the leading digital history research institutes. He is editor of the impressive and inventive web museum Making the History of 1989, which draws on cutting edge content management software ( Omeka) developed by the Center, modeling for the museums and historical organizations who are the intended users of these open source web tools. He has held fellowships from the German Fulbright Commission and the SSRC Berlin program, and is an editor of H-German. Olsen has worked with the Haus der Geschichte in Germany (the premier national museum) in 1998, where he served on the planning team for the Zeitgeschichtlishes Forum in Leipzig. Olsen will offer courses in digital history as well as comparative memory, and oversee the training of students interesting in Public History and New Media. |
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Public History Program director launches new book series, "Public History in Historical Perspective" |
The University of Massachusetts Press is launching a new book series, "Public History in Historical Perspective," that draws on the strengths of the graduate program to bring out new scholarship in the field of public history.
Series editor Marla Miller is joined by editorial board members Max Page and David Glassberg, both of UMass, as well as David Blight (Yale University), Steven Lubar (Brown University), James Oliver Horton (George Washington University), Edward T. Linenthal (Editor, Journal of American History), and other leaders in the field. The aim of this series is to explore, from different critical perspectives, how representations of the past in the U. S. and elsewhere have been mobilized to serve a variety of political, cultural, and social ends. Books in the series will offer analyses of interest not simply to public historians but also the wide community of scholars engaged in efforts to understand the role of the past culture, politics and society. For more information click here. |
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Public History Professor Max Page awarded a Fulbright Fellowship |
Max Page, Associate Professor of Architecture and History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Argentina for the Spring of 2009. Page will be based at El Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura Contemporanea at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, where he will work to develop an exchange program between his department and this university. Page will also lecture about historic preservation in the United States and study the politics of preservation in Argentina for a book about the history and politics of historic preservation. |
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| Public History Program launches new writing track! |
The History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is
pleased to announce a new addition to its graduate program - a track in
writing history for diverse audiences. Part of a larger initiative to infuse
greater attention to writing skills across the graduate curriculum, this new
curricular emphasis will provide students the particular skills needed to
write well for the audiences they seek to reach, be they professional, popular,
national, or local. Genres to be addressed include narrative nonfiction,
magazine writing, essays, and editorials. |
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For More Information Contact:
Director, Public History Program
Department of History, Herter Hall
University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003-3930
Tel. (413) 545-1330
E-mail: history@history.umass.edu
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