About

This course explores “public history,” or history crafted in (or for) non-academic settings by (or in dialogue with) people with some training in the discipline of history. It focuses on the origins and evolution of archives, museums, historic preservation, heritage tourism, cultural resource management, documentary film, oral history, and community history projects, as well as best practices in these aspects of public history. It also examines the role of public memory in advancing certain historical interpretations and suppressing others in public history venues.

A rapidly growing segment of public history involves digital technology. The digital-age public historian, or digital humanist, must do more than understand history and how to make it compelling for diverse audiences. Public history also requires one to apply technology to collect, analyze, and present the past. Thus, digital history accounts for an increasing proportion of history-related careers. After this semester, you will possess a cache of career-applicable knowledge. In short, you will also learn public history by doing public history.

Accordingly, the course project involves developing mini documentaries—virtual museum exhibits—that draw upon a collection of primary sources to tell a story about Cleveland. You will learn the basics of conducting digitally recorded oral histories, electronically clipping and exporting sound files, creating a digital archive, and producing digital films. Specifically, you will digitize, upload, add metadata for, and interpret historical images and documents that you carefully select for their ability convey a historical narrative, and you will pair these with digital clips that you create from existing oral histories. This content will become the centerpiece around which you construct a historically informed interpretation of your chosen project topic by researching and writing an interpretive essay. Your project will be a multi-step process that builds a foundation for writing a more extended interpretive essay and creating your mini documentaries.

My name is Mark Souther, and I am the host of the course blog.  I am an Associate Professor of History at Cleveland State University, where I have taught for the past seven years.  I am a native of Gainesville, Georgia, and earned my B.A. in History at Furman University, M.A. in History at the University of Richmond, and Ph.D. in History at Tulane University.  My first book, New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2006, and I have authored several articles and essays on tourism, suburbs, and urban renewal.  My current research includes a co-edited book, American Tourism: Constructing a National Tradition, recently submitted to the Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, as well as a book project on decline in postwar Cleveland.  My public history work began in 1995, when I worked as a tour guide at a historic house museum in Richmond, Virginia, and continued in the late ’90s and early 2000s when I served on the planning group for the NEH Deep South Regional Humanities Center at Tulane University. I am Co-Director of the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at CSU, whose projects have included the Euclid Corridor History Project, Teaching + Learning Cleveland, and, currently, Curating Cleveland, Mobile Cleveland, and Listening to Cleveland.  I live in Cleveland Heights.