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Curating the kraken
While much ink has been spilled on the role of curation and curators writ large in contemporary culture, it’s useful to have a reminder of the power of the curatorial enterprise–to radically revalue...
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Housekeeping
A few blog- and Suzanne-related notes: This spring you’ll see me in Milwaukee at the NCPH/OAH conference (for which a hashtag has not yet been determined). Our panel “Museums and Makers:...
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History @Work
I’m sure, dear readers, that you are familiar with our only public history professional organization, the National Council on Public History. You may also be familiar with NCPH’s blog on unexpected...
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Elsewhere
As perhaps you’ve noticed, I am now a contributor to The Atlantic Technology channel. I’ve recently written about typewriter nostalgia, shorthand, and Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality. Do...
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Belated Conference Report
It is a testament to the quality and high level of engagement of this year’s NCPH conference that the web is already full of conference reports; here’s mine. The NCPH/OAH meeting in Milwaukee was full...
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On Relevance and Snow-Storm in August
History doesn’t have to have a news peg. Our historical work can be important, compelling, moving, and relevant without making thumpingly explicit connections to today’s news cycle. Both historical...
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Support the DIA
This is a post for my friends in the three-county metro Detroit region, before our primary elections next Tuesday, August 7. On the primary ballot this year in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties is a...
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The move
Friends, since last we spoke I packed everything I owned, drove across most of the country with a yowling cat companion, and arrived safely in the Bay Area, where I am now a curator at the Oakland...
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Against nostalgia
Nostalgia can be an emotion that gets people interested in the past and that draws them back to their own and their family’s history. But it’s a distorting force. It puts a scrim of...
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That weekend
The third weekend in April continues to be excessively popular for conferences in our (dear museum/history-inclined reader!) fields, which this year includes Museums and the Web and NCPH (which looks...
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What World’s Fairs Were Like
I’m working on an exhibit about the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the World’s Fair in San Francisco in 1915, and I’ve been struggling to communicate what, experientially, it was like to be...
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AASLH
I’ll be at AASLH in Birmingham this week, talking about history practice with the biggest gathering of small history museum professionals there is. I’m giving a talk Thursday at 1:30 pm: Vintage or...
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Book Review: Who Owns America’s Past?
Robert C. Post, Who Own’s America’s Past? The Smithsonian and the Problem of History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Bob Post’s new book is a hybrid account—it covers both the history of...
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“Nostalgia erases the actual experiences”
It’s important for me to challenge this nostalgic vision of the past, particularly of the early 90s. So many queers now have this nostalgia for something they never experienced. In the early 90s,...
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Happy new year and elections
I hope your 2014 is full of museumgoing and critical reflection on history! In the new year, may I suggest that the NCPH members among my readers vote in the NCPH board elections? You should have...
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Why we do research
Reading this scholarly book, I came upon this wonderfully forthright explanation of historical curiosity: ”The primary purpose of this monograph is to answer the question, “Man, what’s up with that?”"
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Sustainable Practices for Co-Created Exhibits
Come to our NCPH session, this Thursday morning at 8:30 as part of the NCPH annual meeting in sunny, convenient Monterey. How can co-created projects become a sustainable part of our work? This...
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“the emphatic lives of the long dead”
But for lovers or friends with no past in common the historic past unrolls like a park, like a ridgy landscape full of buildings and people. To talk of books is, for oppressed shut-in lovers, no way...
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Triumphant returns
One of the sharpest museum blogs is back! (Perhaps one day I will also be back.)
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Mark Dion on nostalgia
LCM: Does nostalgia play a role in your work? MD: I try to be historic rather than nostalgic. For me, nostalgia is always tied to the notion of the “Golden Age” of things — this idea that the past was...
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