Public History

"Police Museums in Latin America: Preface"

by Amy Chazkel

Contributing editor of "Forum: Police Museums in Latin America," in "Calling the Law into Question: Confronting the Illegal and Illicit in Public Arenas," Special Issue of the Radical History Review 113 (Spring 2012), 127-33.

Organized by the historian Amy Chazkel, who also provides the foreword, this forum gathers the work of three... more Organized by the historian Amy Chazkel, who also provides the foreword, this forum gathers the work of three historians of Latin America who have written extensively on the social history of crime, prompting them to reflect on a ubiquitous but little studied public history institution: the police museum. Alejandra Bronfman, Lila Caimari, and Robert Buffington, specialists in Cuba, Argentina, and Mexico, respectively, guide us through a selection of five police museums: one in Havana that played a crucial role in legal medicine and developing ideas about race during Cuba's Republican period but no longer exists; one in Buenos Aires that was founded as part of the early twentieth-century wave of police reform and modernization; and two in Mexico City and one in Guadalajara that mushroomed in the context of the Mexican police's public image hemorrhage of recent decades. This forum is a critical examination of not only objects on display but also the deeper logic of the categorizing schemes used in each museum. The official history of crime presented to the public, epitomized by police museums, provides a fascinating counterpoint to the contemporary academic history of crime in Latin America, which is remarkably diverse but converges on its use of historical analysis to challenge normative understandings of the law and the illicit. Far from “calling the law into question,” unsurprisingly, police museums naturalize and dehistoricize the criminal law. Yet this forum points toward ways in which further research on police museums can shed new light on how the public encounters the most problematic and controversial manifestations of state power.

Multiple voices, multiple narratives 03-03-2012

by Jez Collins

"Doing history: A teaching collaboration between St. John's University and the New York Public Library" in the College and Research Libraries News (March 2012

by Elaine Carey

Co-written with Raymond Pun of the NYPL.

Soccer, public history and the National Football Museum.

by Rhiannon Mason

Mason R, Johnes M. Sport in Public History: Soccer, Public History and the National Football Museum. Sport in History 2003, 23(1), 115-131.

History of New Year's Eve in Sydney

by Hannah Forsyth

Entry to the Dictionary of Sydney

Tra Monti: un progetto di public history bnel cuore della Liguria, in Tra Monti.Itinerari tra generazioni lungo i crinali della Val di Vara, Pisa, Felici, 2012, in corso di stampa

by Enrica Salvatori

Room Full of Mirrors: Virtual Tourism and First World Technogaze

by Kali Tal

Co-authored with Eugene W. Lyman, III. Published in Artbyte (May/June 2000).

The problems posed by virtual tourism, with particular focus on the geographic metaphor of cyberspace, and the... more The problems posed by virtual tourism, with particular focus on the geographic metaphor of cyberspace, and the hierarchy or imaginaries.  The question is not whether "real" is better than "virtual," but on who does the imagining and whose story is replaced by the product of imagination.

Conference Announcement (3rd Call): Critical Heritage Studies Conference, 2012

by Emma Waterton

The inaugural conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies will be held at the University of Gothenburg,... more The inaugural conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies will be held at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, in June 2012. The Association of Critical Heritage Studies, to be launched at this conference, will establish in association with International Journal of Heritage Studies (IJHS) an extensive network of heritage scholars across the globe in order to debate and discuss cutting-edge research in the field of heritage studies. We see Heritage Studies as emerging from diverse disciplinary fields, in particular public history, memory studies, museology, cultural heritage, tourism studies, architecture and planning, conservation, as well as cultural geography, sociology, cultural studies and policy, anthropology, archaeology and ethnomusicology, artistic research and artistic practices, and encourage people working in those areas to submit papers or propose sessions/workshops that address the inter-disciplinary nature of Heritage Studies.

Reconstructing Somerset Place: Slavery, memory and historical consciousness

by Alisa Harrison

The Burden of Knowing Versus the Privilege of Unknowing

by Emma Waterton

Issues of ‘guilt’ and ‘apology’ have become enduring themes in cultural politics, with a suite of commemorative acts... more Issues of ‘guilt’ and ‘apology’ have become enduring themes in cultural politics, with a suite of commemorative acts illustrating what Elazar Barkan (2000: xvii) labels “…the new international emphasis on morality”. Such attempts at self-examination have, for example, occurred around memories of the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the legacies of the Stolen Generations, the delicacy of which has drawn scholarly attention towards the complex and painful histories of atrocity, war and genocide. Simultaneously, attention has turned towards eliciting what these events can tell us about existing social relationships within a given society. And quite often what they tell us is not really something we were expecting – or wanting – to hear. This is because such moments of self-examination may reveal active processes of collective amnesia and national forgetting, through which oppressive power relations are subtly sustained and reinforced (Radstone 2001).

To explore this notion of ‘remembering to forget’, this paper considers the commemorative acts surrounding the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. Its aim is to examine the rhetorical resources that emerged within the context of a national performance of collective remembering/forgetting, particularly tropes of ‘moving on’ and ‘the past is the past’. To do so, the paper draws upon the theoretical and methodological tools offered by Critical Discourse Analysis and examines the argumentative organisation of: (1) political, institutional and ‘official’ responses to 1807; and (2) the socially available discourses drawn upon in everyday speech. This data will be examined in terms of the tropes and discursive strategies utilised to actively absolve current generations from challenging the latent issues of power operative within modern discussions on slavery, apology and reparation. 

Public History: pratiche nazionali ed identità globale

by Serge Noiret

Special issue (n.37, 2011/2 of Memoria e Ricerca, Franco Angeli, http://www.francoangeli.it/riviste/sommario.asp?IDRivista=104

INDEX of available essays:

Serge Noiret, Premessa. Per una Federazione Internazionale di Public History
Serge Noiret, La Public History: una disciplina fantasma?
Dan Henry Andersen, Un eroe danese in tempo di guerra. Il festival di Tordenskiold a Frederikshavn dal 1998 al 2010
Thomas Cauvin, Quando è in gioco la Public History: musei, storici e riconciliazione politica nella Repubblica d’Irlanda
Hinke Piersma, Educatori pubblici: gli storici olandesi influenzano la politica contemporanea
Delphine Lauwers, L’Ypres Salient come luogo della memoria europea? Public History e turismo di guerra dal 1919 ai giorni nostri
Jean-Pierre Morin, Trattare la storia e la politica: il ruolo della Public History nello sviluppo della politica dei trattati in Canada
Gerben Zaagsma, Public History oltre lo Stato: presentare il passato Yiddish nell’Europa contemporanea
Francesco Catastini, I festival di storia: una via italiana alla Public History?
Kiran Klaus Patel, La scienza al tempo di Wikileaks. Riflessioni sulla storia contemporanea nel ventesimo secolo
AnnaRita Gori, Tra patria e campanile. Gli operai fiorentini alle mostre di Roma del 1911
Marie-Pierre Besnard, Notre-Dame de Saint-Lô nella Manica: una restituzione virtuale in 3D dopo la distruzione durante la Seconda guerra mondiale

La Public History: una disciplina fantasma? (Public History: a Ghost Discipline?)

by Serge Noiret

published in Serge Noiret (ed.)"Public History: pratiche nazionali ed identità globale, in Memoria e Ricerca, n.37, 2011/2, pp.10-35. With also an introduction called: "Premessa. Per una Federazione Internazionale di Public History", pp.5-7.

The essay aims to analyze how the past is appropriated in the European Public Sphere and which institutions, media and... more The essay aims to analyze how the past is appropriated in the European Public Sphere and which institutions, media and actors are involved in Public History practices. In contrast to the Anglo-Saxon world, a variety of Public History discourses and practices emerged in continental Europe where the English term was rarely translated or deployed: only very rarely are "applied historians" or Public Historians practicing the discipline in a self-conscious manner. In Europe, Public History is often linked to collective identities at different levels: from local memories to the construction of regional, national and pan-European "Heimats" and "realms of memory". Thus, Europeans create multi-dimensional identities and traditions that are based upon Public History activities. This essay identifies the presence in the "polis", of Public History and Public Historians "without the name", using two case-studies, that of national history museums, and that of the emotional perception of the U.S. Civil War in Europe.

Towards a New History: Iredell County, North Carolina

by Jamie Hager Goodall

Dimensione simbolica e vita nazionale nel XX secolo. Storia di una creazione incompiuta

by Andrea Mariuzzo

published in the collective volume 'Dialoghi con il presidente. Allievi ed ex-allievi delle Scuole d’Eccellenza pisane a colloquio con Carlo Azeglio Ciampi', Pisa, Edizioni della Normale 2008

Tour Guides as Creators of Empathy: The Role of Affective Inequality in Marginalizing the Enslaved at Plantation House Museums

by E Arnold Modlin

Published in Tourism Studies

Co-Authored with Derek H. Alderman and Glenn W. Gentry

Criticized for ignoring or misrepresenting slavery, some docents at plantation house museums have responded by... more Criticized for ignoring or misrepresenting slavery, some docents at plantation house museums have responded by including more references to slavery, but rarely move beyond mere factual references of the enslaved. This contrasts with the emotionally evocative accounts tourists hear about the planter-class family. We refer to this disparity as affective inequality. At plantation house museums, affective inequality is created and reproduced through specific spatial and narrative practices by tour guides. By retracing docent-led tours at Destrehan Plantation, Louisiana, this article engages, conceptually and empirically, with the concept of affective inequality — how it contributes to the marginalization of the history of the enslaved community, and how it becomes reproduced within the practices of tour guides at plantation house museums in the Southern US.

I musei della Grande Guerra sul web

by Serge Noiret

in Memoria e Ricerca, new series, no.7, January-June 2001, pp.185-190.

The Historian's New Workshop

by Serge Noiret

in Ilaria Porciani and Lutz Raphael (eds.): Atlas of European historiography: the making of a profession 1800-2005., Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan/European Science Foundation, 2010, p.69.

Associazioni, centri e istituzioni storiche

by Serge Noiret

in Antonino Criscione, Serge Noiret, Carlo Spagnolo and Stefano Vitali: La Storia a(l) tempo di Internet: indagine sui siti italiani di storia contemporanea, (2001-2003)., Bologna, Pátron editore, 2004, pp.105-143.

Il sito Trentoincina (www. trentoincina. it): ovvero come e perché si crea un sito storico in rete se non si è del mestiere

by Serge Noiret

in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 10 (2002), p. 125

El contenido ritual de las tradiciones conmemorativas: alcances y límites

by Maria Flores-Collazo

Published in "El Amauta" Revista del Departamento de Estudios Iberoamericanos de la Universidad de Puerto Rico en Arecibo