Fall 2024 Courses

This new experiential learning course brings you into the practice of public history through your active involvement in a community museum collaborative history project.

Whose history should be told through museums? How should the diverse histories of multi-ethnic and multi-racial communities be represented, interpreted, and explored in public history institutions? Museums, as dynamic institutions that engage and reflect societies, have undergone tremendous change over the past twenty years. These questions are among those that have fostered critical debates, enriched the content and direction of history museums, and generated new museums. Public historians—historians who work beyond the walls of a traditional classroom and are in direct dialogue and partnership with the public—have been deeply involved in these transformations. 

The course introduces you to how public historians think, the types of questions they ask, the methodologies and techniques they use to approach those questions, and how disciplinary knowledge informs their ways of reasoning and doing. It explores issues of power, privilege, and marginalization by working with a community museum that centers the experiences, voices, and perspective of one or more historically excluded and/or marginalized population.