HIST 411 - Public History in the 21st-Century: Overcoming Challenges and Embracing New Technologies

Credits: (3)
You are among the next generation of historians and this class will focus on the complex challenges confronting the field and our increasingly significant role in society as educators, advocates, and preservationists. Who is history for? How is it used and who uses it? Who does it benefit, and how is it used to marginalize and oppress?

You are emerging as scholars during a period of significant technological advancement. New evidence of past cultures, new modes of analysis, and our own evolving perspectives on the present and the past are influencing how we “do” history and how we communicate that history to many audiences. In this class we will be discuss and debate the effectiveness of these technologies. How do we approach and disseminate their research? What does it tell us? How does it inform our own practice? Is the data we compile new, or is this just a different way of seeing a past we think we know all too well?