Archive for the ‘Public History’ Category
Homage to midcentury last: the ranch home
Central living area of the Rosenbaum House, the sole Frank Lloyd Wright home built in Alabama, and the only one in the southeast open to the public. I absolutely love this home and its entire midcentury character. An entire month has passed since I last was brought to this computer screen, to compile some sort [...]
July 25th, 2011StoryCorps and the lives of ordinary people
Recently I’ve taken a keen interest in oral histories, and in the technical and artistic feats behind creating audio stories and making them powerful and relevant. I am overwhelmed by how natural the journalists on NPR and its member stations make it seem. There is a lot of work, a lot of practice–and a lot [...]
February 28th, 2011A city, not a blank slate. More like “an empty and brightly lit stage with lots of directors, scripts, auditions, designers, audiences, and reviewers.”
I haven’t written recently, but it has not been for lack of compelling ideas and discussion in my classes and reading. It has been in fact because of too much of it, alongside a new, second job that I have taken on, and the regularly hefty amount of school work. But I just finished another book for class, that [...]
February 19th, 2011Place: “writing from a place, from a community, from a location in the world”
Reconnecting with my Upper Peninsula past in the summer of 2010, I visited the Iron Mountain Iron Mine, one of my most favorite historical locales as a child. Part of the profession of writing and studying history demands an indifference to place. One reason for this is the slim chance of finding an academic position [...]
January 27th, 2011The city and the country
My city, covered in snow recently The semester has shifted into full swing, even though I have yet to attend a class. I’ve been doing so much reading though, and already have so many dog-eared pages and underlined sentences and bracketed paragraphs, I can tell it’s going to be a theme here for awhile: the [...]
January 19th, 2011My job as a psuedo travel organizer
Part of my job involves reading travel guides. You know, the big fat Lonely Planet ones, and the TimeOut guides that have the colorful pictures. And more than that, the ten-or-so books on my desk are about Cuba: a place I never thought I’d visit. In my regular life, I would have no time to [...]
September 23rd, 2010The things we carry
Secondhand stores: graveyard of TVs past their prime Stuffed animals, out-grown shoes, hand-me-down mugs; aged television sets, dog-eared romance novels, and garish gold picture frames… Secondhand stores can be a treasure trove or a purgatory between home and landfill, and quite often, it is both simultaneously. My mother is renowned for her ability to walk [...]
September 3rd, 2010Make sure you’ve had your tetanus shot, and other important things I learned as an archives intern
Hours of my life were spent removing the various metals used to hold documents together; I especially liked finding actual nails, like these, inside the accounting files. For six weeks this summer, I worked as an intern in the archives department of the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in downtown Kennesaw, Georgia. [...]
August 17th, 2010Stirring up old leaves, long settled: Willie McGee, family history, and good storytelling
Last Friday, while waiting to depart for Charleston, S.C. to visit my brother, I was listening to All Things Considered. Nothing too unusual for five o’clock on a weekday, until I heard Bridgette McGee-Robinson’s story, of an enduring curiosity and quest for answers regarding her grandfather, Willie McGee. In 1951, in the small town of [...]
May 12th, 2010Fighting for a country in which you have no rights…
This may sound more like a description of a totalitarian state, a lawless nation in remote Africa (or urban Africa), or maybe a Soviet-era Eastern European country. I’ve just been learning all about the atrocities suffered on the German-Russian front of WWII in Dan Carlin’s “Ghosts From the Ostfront” podcast series, and how many of [...]
November 12th, 2009