In the second installment of “Field Notes: Public History in the GAPE,” Historian Joshua Dubbert, with support from Communications and Marketing Manager Kristina Smith, discusses the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums. Located in Fremont, Ohio, the organization interprets the life, career, legacy, and times of America’s 19th president, Rutherford B. Hayes. The site offers a variety of public tours and programming throughout the historic Spiegel Grove estate, including special offerings for America’s Semiquincentennial. Dubbert and Smith speak to the site’s unique history and scope, as well as how ongoing research is continuously building a fuller portrait of the Hayes family.
Field Notes: Liz Ferry and the Driehaus Museum
Located in Chicago, the Driehaus Museum engages guests through architecture, art, and design within the 1883 Nickerson Mansion and the 1926 Murphy Auditorium. In this installment of “Field Notes,” Guest Services Coordinator Liz Ferry shares how the Museum’s rich interpretational scope, talented staff, and growing network of institutional connections help preserve these truly unique spaces and tailor the guest experience for maximum engagement. Driehaus Museum Executive Director Lisa Key will join other museum leaders on June 6 for the Closing Plenary of the SHGAPE Conference.
SEX RADICAL: A New Film About a Woman Who Battled the Comstock Regime
Historians of the Gilded Age are certainly familiar with the nefarious deeds of the evangelical “vice-hunter,” Anthony Comstock, but they may not know the story of Ida Craddock, a sex educator, scholar, and sexual mystic who challenged Comstock face-to-face, and who inspired her contemporaries by her courage. SEX RADICAL, the latest film from award-winning writer/director Andy Kirshner tells Craddock’s remarkable story. It will premiere at the end of this month, both theatrically and online.
“Faces of the First Red Scare”: Documenting Red Scare Deportees
Below is an interview with Dr. Kenyon Zimmer, a historian of transnational radicalism. Recently, as I was editing a piece for our blog, I stumbled across his personal website where he has published a comprehensive digital archive of Red Scare deportees. I thought our readers could benefit from this resource, both for their own research and for the classroom. It is also a wonderful example of a digital history project, and Zimmer gives us insight into the surprising responses he’s had to it.
Call for Participation: Mark Twain House and Museum Essay Series
The Mark Twain House and Museum has just launched a new program called “It Happened in Your Town.” They are inviting Connecticut teachers, students, and historical societies to provide research on their local communities in the year 1874. The museum invites SHGAPE members to put this research in a broader context for the public through a series of short essays.
Using Microhistory to Tell a Whale of a Tale
Although it was many years ago, I still vividly remember microhistory week in my graduate research and methods course. When employing microhistory, the historian uses a small event or story to illuminate much larger contexts and historical trends. And, as Duane Corpis suggests, one of microhistory’s great strengths is the ability to present “especially peculiar moments in the past” along with “strange and bizarre events.” I think I was particularly taken with this description because I myself was holding onto an odd tale that I wanted to tell one day, one that I had discovered years earlier in the obituary of my great-great-grandfather, a whaling captain.
Teaching Digital Literacy through a Walking Tour about the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot
Working with three first-year students and two graduate students at Georgia State University, I oversaw the development of a self-guided walking tour that uses David Fort Godshalk’s Veiled Visions to describe the horrific events that occurred on Saturday, September 22nd, the first day of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. The tour, available for free on Emory University’s mobile-optimized OpenTour website, takes about an hour to complete and extends approximately three quarters of a mile across downtown Atlanta. The race riot raged for three days, as angry mobs stormed from downtown Atlanta to surrounding neighborhoods.