It’s Not What You Think: Challenging Assumptions Through Public History

Fri, Nov 17, 2017

10:30 AM–6:00 PM

Room C198 and Rooms C201/C202

Join us for The CUNY Public History Collective’s Second Annual Conference, “It’s Not What You Think: Challenging Assumptions Through Public History,” featuring Keynote speaker Sarah Henry, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at Museum of the City of New York.

The conference hopes to address how public history can be a tool for challenging previous knowledge, complicating beliefs, reversing expectations, broadening perspectives, righting wrongs, and presenting a more honest history.

Visitors to museums, cultural institutions, archives, and other public history sites often come with preconceived assumptions about the past shaped by distant experiences of high school courses, patriotic political rhetoric, or popular myth. The conference will ask how public historians can challenge these myths and articulate new narratives while living up to the expectations of the public in a diverse and increasingly polarized country. We will also explore how the form and function of public history sites can be used to expand conceptions of what cultural spaces should look like and who they should engage with.

The conference is free and open to the public, but we ask you please Register for the conference here.

2017 Public History Collective Conference Schedule

10:30-11:00: Registration, Concourse Level

11:00-11:15: Welcome and Opening Remarks,Room C198

11:15-12:15: What is Public History? Who is it For? What our Work Has Taught Us, Room C201

11:15-12:15: Votes for Women!: Bringing the Woman Suffrage Movement in 1917 New York to Life at the New-York Historical Society’s DiMenna Children’s History Museum, Room C202

12:20-1:20: Not Your Father’s Genealogy, Room C201

12:20-1:20: Historical Meaning-Making and the Legacies of Black Teachers, Room C202

1:20-2:30: Lunch, Graduate Center History Department, 5114 2:30-3:50: Creating Spaces of Public Awareness: Process and Practice, Room C201

2:30-3:50: Landscapes and Locations of Memory, Room C202

4:00-5:00: Keynote Address, Room C198

5:00-6:00: Reception, Graduate Center History Department, Room 5114

Co-sponsored by the Public History Collective Working Group.

https://vimeo.com/243875890

Participants

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Tags
Urbanism Public Space History