This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
This completes a three-volume documentary history of the work of John Franklin Jameson. Composed principally of Jameson’s extensive public and private correspondence, Volume 3 highlights his most important contributions as managing editor of the American Historical Review, director of the Department of Historical Research at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, fund-raiser for the Dictionary of American Biography, and, most important, chief architect and promoter of both the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Archives. This volume brings once more to life a man whose deeds and thoughts continue to influence the world we live in.
PUBLIC HISTORY PROVIDES A BACKGROUND IN THE HISTORY, PRINCIPLES, AND PRACTICES OF THE FIELD OF PUBLIC HISTORY Public History: An Introduction from Theory to Application is the first text of its kind to offer both historical background on the ways in which historians have collected, preserved, and interpreted history with and for public audiences in the United States since the nineteenth century to the present and instruction on current practices of public history. This book helps us recognize and critically evaluate how, why, where, and who produces history in public settings. This unique textbook provides a foundation for students advancing to a career in the types of spaces–museums, historic sites, heritage tourism, and archives–that require an understanding of public history. It offers a review of the various types of methodologies that are commonly employed including oral history and digital history. The author also explores issues of monuments and memory upon which public historians are increasingly called to comment. Lastly, the textbook includes a section on questions of ethics that public historians must face in their profession. This important book: Contains a synthetic history on the significant individuals and events associated with museums, historic preservation, archives, and oral history. Includes exercises for putting theory into practice Designed to help us uncover hidden histories, construct interpretations, create a sense of place, and negotiate contested memories Offers an ideal resource for students set on working in museums, historic sites, heritage tourism, and more Written for students, Public History: An Introduction from Theory to Application offers in one comprehensive volume a guide to an understanding of the fundamentals of public history in the United States.
Processing the Past explores the dramatic changes taking place in historical understanding and archival management, and hence the relations between historians and archivists. Written by an archivist and a historian, it shows how these changes have been brought on by new historical thinking, new conceptions of archives, changing notions of historical authority, modifications in archival practices, and new information technologies. The book takes an "archival turn" by situating archives as subjects rather than places of study, and examining the increasingly problematic relationships between historical and archival work. By showing how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians and archivists in Europe and North America came to occupy the same conceptual and methodological space, the book sets the background to these changes. In the past, authoritative history was based on authoritative archives and mutual understandings of scientific research. These connections changed as historians began to ask questions not easily answered by traditional documentation, and archivists began to confront an unmanageable increase in the amount of material they processed and the challenges of new electronic technologies. The authors contend that historians and archivists have divided into two entirely separate professions with distinct conceptual frameworks, training, and purposes, as well as different understandings of the authorities that govern their work. Processing the Past moves toward bridging this divide by speaking in one voice to these very different audiences. Blouin and Rosenberg conclude by raising the worrisome question of what future historical archives might be like if historical scholars and archivists no longer understand each other, and indeed, whether their now different notions of what is archival and historical will ever again be joined.
John Franklin Jameson (1859-1937) was instrumental in the development of history as an academic discipline in the United States. After the Johns Hopkins University awarded him the country's first doctorate in history, he became a founder of the American Historical Association, served as the first managing editor of the American Historical Review, and was a key figure in the creation of the National Archives, the National Historical Publications Commission, and the Dictionary of American Biography. This book, the first volume in an ambitious documentary edition of Jameson's public and private papers, contains essays representing Jameson's own scholarly concerns, followed by documents that reflect his role as an advocate for public support of historical and humanistic research. Many of these writings appear in print here for the first time. As a writer on historical subjects, Jameson is best known for his small book on the American Revolution, published late in his career. The scholarly essays contained in this volume, however, reveal pioneering work in a variety of subjects, including American political history, black history, southern constitutional and political history, and social history. In such writings Jameson showed great sensitivity to the significance of race, religion, ethnicity, and culture as historical elements. At a time when the study of American political institutions predominated among historical scholars, Jameson championed the claims of social, economic, and religious history and provided a basis for further research that historians have yet to exploit fully. The remaining documents in this volume not only demonstrate Jameson's advocacy of scholarship but also reveal him as a thoughtful commentator on the academic world at a crucial point in its development. Jameson entreated historical societies and professional scholars to decide for themselves the historical research that needed to be done and to seek support accordingly, instead of simply doing whatever work wealthy patrons were willing to subsidize. Similarly, he told colleges and universities to give scholars the freedom to engage in research without being hamstrung by the predilections of trustees. And, finally, he admonished the federal government to fulfill its responsibility to protect and publish historically significant documents. "As a young scholar," notes Morey Rothberg in his introduction, "Jameson was trapped between his desire to explore the social aspects of American political history and his conservative political instincts which appeared to frustrate that ambition. Consequently, he established a career as an institution builder rather than as a writer of historical narrative. He ultimately provided the American historical profession a national structure within which the distinctive elements of race, ethnicity, class, and culture could be investigated by others, since he could not bring himself to attempt this task." The two future volumes in this project will bring together Jameson's correspondence and other documents that detail Jameson's strategies for encouraging the growth of professional scholarship. The completed project promises a wealth of rich insights into the significance of humanistic research and education in contemporary society--a tool not only for historians but also for cultural administrators, journalists, and those involved in politics and government.
From lagging book sales and shrinking job prospects to concerns over the discipline's "narrowness," myriad factors have been cited by historians as evidence that their profession is in decline in America. Ian Tyrrell's Historians in Public shows that this perceived threat to history is recurrent, exaggerated, and often misunderstood. In fact, history has adapted to and influenced the American public more than people—and often historians—realize. Tyrrell's elegant history of the practice of American history traces debates, beginning shortly after the profession's emergence in American academia, about history's role in school curricula. He also examines the use of historians in and by the government and whether historians should utilize mass media such as film and radio to influence the general public. As Historians in Public shows, the utility of history is a distinctive theme throughout the history of the discipline, as is the attempt to be responsive to public issues among pressure groups. A superb examination of the practice of American history since the turn of the century, Historians in Public uncovers the often tangled ways history-makers make history-both as artisans and as actors.
The importance of records in modern society is explored by re-examining some of the historical antecedents for critical functions in the modern records professions. The motivation for writing this book comes from a conviction of the importance of records and records professionals in organizations and society, as well as the need to possess a stronger sense of the events, trends, people, debates, and controversies producing the modern records professions. Archivists and records managers have tended to discount the importance of their historical antecedents, ignoring the fact that many of the current debates and issues before the profession are not new but embedded in the historical evolution of the records professions. Re-examining some of the historical origins helps records professionals to re-examine their mission to manage records for the benefit of organizations and of all of society. Such re-evaluation also helps to remind records professionals and others that the concerns generated by new electronic recordkeeping technologies are not new at all but built deep within the fabric of traditional records creation and administration.
Based on unique and previously unpublished sources, this book examines in detail the complex, emotional, and difficult movement to remove the National Archives and Records Service from the control of the U.S. General Services Administration. This struggle began almost from the time the National Archives lost its independence in 1950 and culminated during the tenure of Robert Warner as sixth Archivist of the United States. The story is important to the history of the National Archives but also to those interested in the political process, especially as it applies to educational and cultural institutions. The lobbying, overt and covert, the interplay of professional organizations and archivists, librarians, and historians with the executive and legislative branches of the American government are examined in fascinating detail in this often very personal story. It is a study of high drama, bitter disappointments, and ultimate success.
The public increase of interest in the past has not necessarily brought with it a greater understanding about how archives are formed. To this end, Richard Cox takes a serious look at archival repositories and collections. Cox suggests that archives do not just happen, but are consciously shaped (and sometimes distorted) by archivists, the creators of records, and other individuals and institutions. In this series of essays, Cox offers archivists rare insight into the fundamentals of appraisal, and historians and other users of archives the opportunity to appreciate the collections they all too often take for granted.
