A few weeks ago, a student asked me to define public history. Her interest in studying the past as an academic was heighten by a discussion of how non-academics have contributed to the study of Japanese American incarceration through oral history projects up and down the Pacific coast. Ten years ago, this would have been an easy question to answer, but with the rapid growth in the digital humanities, the face of public history has changed. I ultimately said that public history helps us to bring together history and memory in ways that touch the lives of every community member, not just those who have dedicated their life to academic research. Public history is past made present. It brings together people from all walks of life to share their stories and preserve their memories in order to enrich and strengthen community ties.
Storied Past will be a place of exchange for those who are working on linking history and memory in their own communities. This project seeks to explore not only community stories -- in images, in sound, and in writing -- but also how we remember the past as part of our social ties to one another. I came to the academic study of history through my own personal ties with the past. I hope to use this platform to help myself and others tell stories about our communities, all while learning about techniques and tools for people in or out of academia to do this important work. In the process, I hope to curate methods to making history as part of community building, sharing resources and ideas to link academic approaches to research with the needs of community members to build and share their pasts.
Finally, this is going to be a place for me to share my own work in community history, including my own struggles with thinking about how to study small towns in California. I'm starting on a journey to re-conceptualize my own approach to scholarship and what it means for me to be a historian, particularly with the incredible possibilities afforded by new media. What this means is that this might be messy at points. Indeed, I'm not sure exactly where this will lead, but I'm excited to get started and, perhaps, complicate our ideas about what public history can be in the twenty first century!
Storied Past will be a place of exchange for those who are working on linking history and memory in their own communities. This project seeks to explore not only community stories -- in images, in sound, and in writing -- but also how we remember the past as part of our social ties to one another. I came to the academic study of history through my own personal ties with the past. I hope to use this platform to help myself and others tell stories about our communities, all while learning about techniques and tools for people in or out of academia to do this important work. In the process, I hope to curate methods to making history as part of community building, sharing resources and ideas to link academic approaches to research with the needs of community members to build and share their pasts.
Finally, this is going to be a place for me to share my own work in community history, including my own struggles with thinking about how to study small towns in California. I'm starting on a journey to re-conceptualize my own approach to scholarship and what it means for me to be a historian, particularly with the incredible possibilities afforded by new media. What this means is that this might be messy at points. Indeed, I'm not sure exactly where this will lead, but I'm excited to get started and, perhaps, complicate our ideas about what public history can be in the twenty first century!
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