Things are going well at the new museum. Turns out that all the hot air advocacy I’ve articulated on this blog over the last year actually is viable inside an institution, and even better, shared by others. This place is in transition–I’m excited about the direction it is heading, and glad to be able to be a … More Follow my work on GreenbackAmerica
Not two weeks into Richmond and I’ve already discovered that what I’ve heard is true. History and historic sites are at the center of a fairly robust public dialog. Outside of Asheville and the “Army of Liberation” event last year, I can’t think of any organizations or institutions that are actively nurturing alternative stories or … More Reimagined monuments in RVA
So I’ve moved to Richmond, Virginia, and have begun working at the American Civil War Museum. Can you believe that? I am the guest curator for a two-year Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded initiative (in partnership with the Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia) to develop two temporary exhibits in … More On to Richmond; or, A Change of Base
The plenary session at the Society of Civil War Historians annual meeting kicked off with three scholars talking about their work in the public sphere. A great opening to discuss historians in public, but the audience bounced from classroom to Eric Foner to the classroom to Facebook engagement to the classroom to Reconstruction scholarship. I sense … More SCWH is missing public history and public history is missing SCWH
Here, John Hennessey speaks about the difficulty of changing how we talk about the Civil War. The problem, as I understand it, is that we (Americans) “like our history to be very simple.” Hennessey locates the origin of our present simplicities in the Reconciliationist narratives about brave soldiers and common ground. Simplicities calcify into “conventional wisdom” … More Personal connections, but not *those* personal connections
I would ordinarily just tweet a link to this Mountain Xpress article, but I think Milton Ready really hints at the historical, transformational, import of HB2, a bill “that was never about bathrooms or trans-anything”– Crafted by rural legislators like Phil Berger of Eden and Tim Moore of Kings Mountain, HB2 perfectly expresses a gerrymandered, … More NC Historian on HB2
In “From Women’s History to Gender History,” Ashley Luskey and Robert Dunkerly detail their attempts to introduce gender into programming at Richmond National Battlefield Park. This doesn’t mean gender as a social category and layering in representations of women’s experiences, but gender as feminine and masculine “’ways of perceiving’ that have shaped the way individuals … More Personal meaning through analytical frameworks
