National Council on Public History

Happy weekend NCPH! Good news: We’re extending the nomination period for a few of our 2025 awards! If you would like to submit a nomination for our Student Travel Award, Student Project Award, or Diversity Travel Award, please make sure to submit by 12/10. The nomination process is not arduous, and self-nominations are welcome. Find the forms and details at https://lnkd.in/d4CJUe5p

Refusing to look away. Lonnie G. Bunch,  Secretary of the Smithsonian and founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, writes for American Heritage about the need for unflinching honesty about history. Bunch reflects on his meetings with the family of Emmett Till, who encouraged him to preserve and display Till’s casket in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The power that the object holds—both in its potential for facilitating human connection and its confrontation of historical truths that some would prefer to forget or ignore—makes it essential to the museum and to the American story. “The Emmett Till story is an example of how history changes, depending on the narrators, and how perception can become reality, and only through an honest appraisal of the evidence can we piece together what truly happened,” Bunch wrote. You can read the article here: https://lnkd.in/gfA5XMEa #ncph #publichistory #publichistorians #smithsonian #emmetttill

Discussant application deadline extended! If you are passionate about accessibility in your professional organizations or experience navigating access needs, consider applying as a Discussant for a year-long Working Group on Accessibility, Disability, and Public History. Apps due by December 15, 2024. NCPH, with support from the American Council on Learned Societies (ACLS), is now taking applications for participants in a 2025 year-long virtual working group whose task will be to develop a cohesive and comprehensive strategy for NCPH’s accessibility efforts—both internally as a membership and professional organization and in the ways we can support our members in centering disability history and disability justice in their work. If you are passionate about accessibility in your professional organizations or experience navigating access needs, consider applying. Learn more and submit an application here: https://lnkd.in/gVcMDQHM

What’s in a name? The Pacific Northwest Inlander takes a look at the namesakes for Spokane, Washington’s local schools, where recent efforts have been made to name or rename schools to reflect changing values and recognize historical figures from marginalized communities. (Shoutout to NCPH member Larry Cebula, who is interviewed for the piece!) One of the district’s schools has been named after Carla Olman Peperzak. Peperzak was born in Amsterdam in 1923 and lived near Anne Frank. She joined the Dutch resistance at age 18. She was able to save some of her family members and other Jews who would have been sent to concentration camps. She moved to Spokane in 2004. She is known for her contributions to education and the community, and for teaching about the Holocaust across Washington state. Pictured: Carla Olman Peperzak is comforted by her daughters as she learns the school named for her will receive a sapling from the tree outside the Anne Frank House. After nearly four years of trying to secure a sapling from the tree for the school, Peperzak says she thought it would never happen. "I couldn't believe it," she says. "It's hard to explain what a tree means, but it's terribly, terribly important for me." Photo credit: Erick Doxey. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/gA5UfRVN #ncph #publichistory #publichistorians  

Segregation academies continue to receive state funding. ProPublica’s latest in their ongoing investigation into Southern private schools founded in the 1960s and 1970s as state-supported efforts to evade federally-mandated desegregation, called segregation academies, shows that those schools continue to receive significant funding from state voucher programs. Most of these schools remain de facto segregated, a reminder that “school choice” remains an instrument for enforcing racial segregation in defiance of law to this day. Read the report by Jennifer Berry Hawes and Mollie Simon here: https://lnkd.in/gztVQW5V Photo illustration by Emily Scherer for ProPublica. Source images: Library of Congress, Princeton University library, Wikimedia Commons. #ncph #publichistory #publichistorians  #ProPublica

Attention #NCPH2025 attendees! The deadline for most NCPH 2025 Annual Meeting Awards is Sunday, 12/1/24. For guidelines and application details visit: https://lnkd.in/d4CJUe5p. Questions? Email our Membership Coordinator, Stasia, at atanzer@iu.edu. Earlier this year we highlighted the NCPH 2024 Awardees on our Instagram @publichistorians: https://lnkd.in/gXS2Mtzn. Check out their stories and let them inspire you to apply for an #NCPH2025 Award.

Hey #NCPH2025 student attendees! We’re looking for students at the undergrad or graduate level to work a four-hour volunteer shift at NCPH 2025 next March in Montréal in exchange for complimentary conference registration. If you’re a student looking to close the gap between your budget and your travel costs, fill out a volunteer form via https://lnkd.in/gNKewU_3 for consideration. We’ll take volunteers in the order they apply, with a limit of two students per school (three for our Patron and Partner departments). You must be a member of NCPH and 21 years old by March 26 to volunteer.

The power of small museums. “Can Supporting Small Museums Solve Larger Problems in the Museum Field? I believe they can.” So writes Alli Schell for the blog Museums and Race. With more investment, Schell argues, very small museums would have the power to transform the museum landscape by advancing racial equity, breaking down hierarchies that drive the museum field, improving working conditions and benefits for museum workers, and changing the world of grant funding for the better. Read Schell’s full piece here: https://lnkd.in/gvnAAtnH    Photo credit: Interior of a small museum, Billy Hathorn, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons   #ncph #publichistory #publichistorians #museums  

Eye on the National Archives: On October 31, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) broke a story contending that Biden-appointed US Archivist Colleen Shogan and her staff are editing coming exhibits at the National Archives Museum to make American history more comfortable and sanitized. The story alleges that during the development process, changes have been made to forthcoming exhibits to portray the Founding Fathers more positively; reduce focus on Japanese-American incarceration camps; cut references to environmental hazards; and remove reference to the birth control pill. As Nathan J. Robinson writes, “The correct stance for an archivist is to be committed to telling a truthful story that reflects what actually happened, even if this makes some people uncomfortable because there are truths they would rather block out of their understanding of the country’s past.” The WSJ piece is behind a paywall, but you can find a good summary and analysis of it at: https://lnkd.in/gg_3TgK5. Other news sites have followed the story, including:  https://lnkd.in/gwvQMY5m and https://lnkd.in/g_jNtVeV You can read Shogan’s response here: https://lnkd.in/gEbigFxQ #ncph #publichistory #publichistorians #nationalarchives

Effective today, Friday, November 15, at 12:00 pm Eastern, NCPH will be stepping back from the Twitter/X platform. Our account, which retains the history and memory of a vibrant and joyful online public history community, will stay up, but we will no longer be actively monitoring or posting there. We will not expose our social media volunteers to a space that no longer feels safe or productive. Staff has hit the limit of our capacity to monitor and spend time on a hostile platform where speech, core functionality, and the terms of service are subject to partisan and corporate whims. We look forward to spending more time with our public history community on Bluesky, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, and we may soon have a few new tricks up our sleeves. For non-members who infrequently use social media, the best way to keep up with NCPH is to sign up for infrequent emails via https://lnkd.in/g2ZkZa6x. For more frequent updates from us, you can join our community of public historians at https://lnkd.in/gKfpCiZM.