Bøger i Public History in Historical Perspective serien

With in-depth research and an expansive scope, Rescued from Oblivion offers a vital account of the formation of historical culture and consciousness in the early United States, re-centring in the record groups long marginalized from the national memory.

Focuses on three Museums Connect projects arranged between the United States and South Africa, Morocco, and Afghanistan, respectively. Utilizing a diverse range of oral interviews, Richard Harker explores how museums negotiate national boundaries, institutional and local histories, and post-9/11 geopolitical interests.

Taking up previously unexamined primary sources and cultural productions that include the first scholarly studies of the faith, material culture and visual arts, stage performances, and museum exhibitions, Shaker Fever compels a reconsideration of this religious group and its place within American memory.

Traces the histories of the largest, most lucrative, and rapidly growing genealogical databases to delineate a broader history of the industry. As each unique case study reveals, new database and DNA technologies enable an obsessive completeness - the desire to gather all of the world's genealogical records in the interests of life beyond death.

Presents the first in-depth exploration of the East India Marine Society Museum. Offering fresh perspectives on museums in the US before the Civil War and how they helped shape an American identity, George Schwartz explores the practices of collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting a diversity of international objects and art in the early US.

While Britain and other countries have established national museums to nurture their seagoing traditions, America has left that responsibility to private institutions. In this first-of-its-kind history, James Lindgren focuses on a half-dozen of these great museums, ranging from Salem's East India Marine Society to San Francisco's Maritime Museum.

West of downtown St. Louis sits an 1851 town house that bears no obvious relationship to its surroundings. Now the Campbell House Museum, the house has been subject to energetic preservation and heritage work. Heidi Aronson Kolk explores the complex and sometimes contradictory motivations for safeguarding the house as a site of public memory.

To understand how settlement histories are used to promote social, political, and commercial relations across national borders, Adam Hjorthen explores the little-known phenomenon of cross-border commemorations. He argues that scholarship on public commemoration should engage the shared and contested meanings of history across local, national, and transnational contexts.

To preserve Scotland's unique antiquities and natural specimens, a Scottish earl founded the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1780. Now numbering twelve million objects, these collections formed the foundation for what eventually became the National Museum of Scotland. Alima Bucciantini traces how these collections have helped tell the changing stories of this country for centuries.

Since its founding in 1846 "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge," the Smithsonian Institution has been an important feature of the American cultural landscape. In A Living Exhibition, William S. Walker examines the tangled history of cultural exhibition at the Smithsonian from its early years to the chartering of the National Museum of the American Indian in 1989.

What happens when marginalized communities do not find their history in dominant narratives? How do they create a useable past to bind their political communities together and challenge their exclusion? In Clio's Foot Soldiers, Lara Leigh Kelland investigates these questions by examining 1960s and 1970s social movements comprised of historically marginalized peoples.

In the 1970s, Argentina was the leader in the "Dirty War," a violent campaign by authoritarian South American regimes to repress left-wing groups and any others who were deemed subversive. Over the course of a decade, Argentina's military rulers tortured and murdered upwards of 30,000 citizens. Even today, after thirty years of democratic rule, the horror of that time continues to roil Argentine society. Argentina has also been in the vanguard in determining how to preserve sites of torture, how to remember the "disappeared," and how to reflect on the causes of the Dirty War. Across the capital city of Buenos Aires are hundreds of grassroots memorials to the victims, documenting the scope of the state's reign of terror. Although many books have been written about this era in Argentina's history, the original Spanish-language edition of Memories of Buenos Aires was the first to identify and interpret all of these sites. It was published by the human rights organization Memoria Abierta, which used interviews with survivors to help unearth that painful history. This translation brings this important work to an English-speaking audience, offering a comprehensive guidebook to clandestine sites of horror as well as innovative sites of memory. The book divides the 48 districts of the city into 9 sectors, and then proceeds neighborhood-by-neighborhood to offer descriptions of 202 known "sites of state terrorism" and 38 additional places where people were illegally detained, tortured, and killed by the government.

Traces the transformation of antiques from family keepsakes to valuable artistic objects, examining the role of collectors, dealers, and museum makers in the construction of a new tradition based on the aesthetic qualities of early American furnishings. This book examines the role of Jewish dealers in promoting American antiques.