“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.” (Henry Ford, Chicago Tribune, 1916). Swigger argues in ‘History is Bunk: Assembling the Past at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village that “Ford’s…

Tales from the Haunted South Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles is an exploration of the popularity of ghost tours in the Southern United States. To understand why these stories are so popular and what they say about history Miles visits various cemeteries, plantations and manors. Tiya…

The Art of Relevance by Nina Simon discusses how to create exhibits that have meaning, purpose and value to viewers. It’s too easy to become indifferent or even removed from an exhibit in a museum setting. How do we create an exhibit that is engaging and relevant?  Well that is easy we just have to understand…

Dr. Amy Lonetree is a citizen of Ho-Chunk Nation. She is a professor of history and her work focuses on the representation of Native Americans in history, national and tribal museums, and art. Her book, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies) explores the way native peoples…

The Animals Always sculpture is in the Steven F. Schankman Family Plaza right outside the south entrance at the St. Louis Zoo. The sculpture was created by Albert Paley and donated by Thelma Zalk in 2006. This monument is a tribute to the endangered animals sculpted in the piece as well as a tribute to…

Seth Bruggeman scrutinizes the concept of remembrance using George Washington’s birthplace. He focuses on the roles of gender, object fetishism, historical archaeology and replicas in constructing public memory. As an anthropologist I really enjoyed what he had to say in chapter 4 “A Contest of Relics”.  The main focus of this chapter is that historical…

Lara Kelland’s Clio’s Foot Soldiers: Twentieth-Century U.S. Social Movements and Collective Memoryexplores how different groups can influence the way their cultural past is remembered. Collective memory is how a group remembers their past, and how that memory is pasted from one generation to the next. During the 1960s and 1970s activists used collective memory to create…

M. J. Rymsza-Pawloska is a Director at American University for the Public History graduate program. Her book History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s, discusses how during the 1960s and 1970s American TV became saturated with historical shows and mini-series about American history. This is contrast to earlier generations of Americans who seemed…

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”- James Baldwin “Stranger in the Village” Alison Landsberg is an associate professor at George Mason University for a couple of departments; the Department of History and Art History, and the Department of Cultural Studies. Her background is in memory studies, and she has authored…

I received my BA in Anthropology from the University of Missouri- St. Louis in 2013.  That same year I entered the workforce and set out to help change the culture of healthcare in America for the better. After 7 years of analytics, process improvement, Agile certifications, a Masters in Healthcare Administration, and doing everything I could…