Public history is a vibrant and growing field. At LMU, we define public history expansively, to include both the study of the public uses and representations of the past and public history as field and practice – in museums, archives, and historical societies; at historic sites and in historical preservation; to inform public policy; in film, television, and podcasts; in doing oral history and community history. You can learn more about public history from the National Council on Public History, including its History@Work blog and its journal The Public Historian (access the journal through the library). The American Historical Association and the American Association for State and Local History also offer resources for public historians.
Historians are also increasingly making use of digital tools to do their work. The library’s Digital Scholarship website includes Project Tool Kit and a Digital Project Checklist. I’ve also given this checklist to students in the past. There are lots of great digital tools out there, including:
- Timeline JS
- TimeMapper
- ArcGIS StoryMaps
- Omeka
- WordPress
- LMU Build is a free web hosting and content management service for current students and is a great way to get started using digital tools.
If you want some inspiration, check out the projects from George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig for History and New Media and Cleveland State University’s Center for Digital Humanities. Other great DH projects include:
- Black Central Europe
- Slave Voyages
- Georgetown Slavery Archive
- Mapping the Haitian Revolution
- Making the History of 1989
- New Fascism Syllabus
- American Panorama
You might also find inspiration in the work of your fellow students, who have undertaken different kinds of public history and digital history projects, some of which are linked on my Teaching page.
