Liaison Specialist (and NYU APH alum) Jason Steinhauer of the Library of Congress Veterans History Project will present a lecture and discussion on the contributions, impact and legacy of American Jewish service during World War II on Monday, May 3, at noon in the West Dining Room of the Library’s James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave., S.E., Washington, D.C.

Cosponsored by VHP and the Hebrew Language Table, the program is part of the Library’s plans to commemorate Jewish American Heritage Month.

“More than 550,000 American Jewish soldiers served during World War II, and they received 52,000 decorations for gallantry,” said Bob Patrick, VHP director. “Their contribution to Allied victory was enormous; their military service, transformative for an entire generation.”

The lecture and discussion draws on collections from the Veterans History Project and Steinhauer’s work as assistant curator on the award-winning exhibition Ours to Fight For: American Jews in the Second World War at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. The exhibition received the American Association of Museums’ Grand Prize for Excellence in Exhibitions for 2003.

The Veterans History Project houses the remarkable stories of hundreds of American Jewish war veterans. First-person accounts of veterans of the Second World War are spotlighted in one of the project’s Experiencing War web features, titled “Jewish Veterans of World War II.”

The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution, is the world’s preeminent reservoir of knowledge, providing unparalleled collections and integrated resources to Congress and the American people. Many of the Library’s rich resources and treasures may also be accessed through the Library’s website, and via interactive exhibitions on a personalized website at myLOC.gov.

Congress created The Veterans History Project in 2000 as a national documentation program of the American Folklife Center to record, preserve and make accessible the first-hand remembrances of American wartime veterans from World War I through the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war. More than 68,000 individual stories comprise the collection to date. The project relies on volunteers to record veterans’ remembrances using guidelines accessible at www.loc.gov/vets/. Volunteer interviewers may request information at vohp@loc.gov or the toll-free message line at (888) 371-5848. Subscribe to the VHP RSS to receive periodic updates of VHP news.

Hello!

This is my inaugural post and thanks to the Archives and Public History Program for the (cyber) space.

I work at the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, which has teamed up with NARA, NEH, the National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian and USHMM to pay tribute to women and their accomplishments, from ecology to aviation. (Here’s the official site).

The Veterans History Project has collected the oral history testimony of thousands of women who’ve participated in America’s defining conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries. You can listen to a handful of highlighted stories in our web-feature “Women of Four Wars” and you can search our database to learn about Women Airforce Service Pilots in World War II, nurses in Vietnam and Korea, and female helicopter pilots in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sometimes it’s easy to be cynical about our national history months. There seems to be one every month, and the celebrations can be a bit hokie or simplistic. Oral history helps reinforce what these months are supposed to be about.  Women’s History Month celebrates extraordinary women in order to recognize how inextricable their contributions are to the accomplishments of America as a whole, as well as empower younger generations. The experiences of military women collected by the Veterans History Project illuminate how “ordinary” women became extraordinary through their actions under the most trying of circumstances.  It reminds us that events do not define us, but rather how we respond to events. Military women have consistently responded in historic ways.

How else does oral history work to enhance and add meaning to our national history months? I’d be interested to hear comments from those at other institutions.

National Council on Public History

2010 Annual Meeting – “Currents of Change” – Portland, OR

Call for Posters

The Poster Session is a format for presentations about projects that use visual evidence. It offers an alternative for presenters eager to share their work through one-on-one discussion, can be especially useful for work-in-progress, and may be a particularly appropriate format where visual or material evidence represents a central component of the project. The Call is open through December 10, 2009. Click here for more information, or visit www.ncph.org.

Awards

We also invite you to make nominations for the 2010 NCPH Awards program. Information about the following awards is listed at http://www.ncph.org/Awards/tabid/279/Default.aspx. Submissions are due December 10, 2009. Awards will be presented at the conference in Portland.

• Outstanding Public History Project – $1,000

• Excellence in Consulting Award – up to two $450 awards

• NCPH Book Award – $1,000

• G. Wesley Johnson TPH Article Award – $750

• Michael C. Robinson Prize for Historical Analysis – $500

• NCPH and HRA New Professional Awards – two $500 travel grants

• Student Project Award – $500 travel grant

• Graduate Student Travel Award – five $300 awards

Be a part of the 2010 NCPH Annual Meeting! Please let us know if you have questions.

For full details, visit http://www.ncph.org

All,

There’s a great article today in /Inside Higher Ed/ on a symposium
called “Platforms for Public Scholars” by the always intelligent and
remarkable Scott McLemee. Sample quotation: “The public library is an
institution that nobody would be able to start now. A place where you
can read brand-new books and magazines for free? The intellectual
property lawyers would be suing before you finished the thought. So
while musing on collaborative and civic-minded research, it is worth
remembering the actually existing public infrastructure that is still
around. Strengthening that infrastructure needs to be a priority for
public scholarship.”

Special note to Creating Digital History students: digital archives are
mentioned as examples of public scholarship, and the organizer of the
symposium said talking about “We definitely want to produce a online
bibliography but maybe trying to use the Zotero exhibition approach there.”

Highly recommended. http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee263

Amanda

–
Amanda L. French, Ph.D.
Assistant Research Scholar, Digital Curriculum Specialist
Archives and Public History
New York University
King Juan Carlos Center
53 Washington Square South #507
New York, NY 10012

TEL: 212-998-8638
FAX: 212-995-4017
AIM: habitrailgirl
amanda.french@nyu.edu

http://amandafrench.net

http://twitter.com/amandafrench

Public Scholarship and American Studies Conference at Rutgers University
Location: New Jersey, United States
Call for Papers Deadline: 2009-10-18 (in 9 days)
Date Submitted: 2009-09-24
Announcement ID: 170840
The Graduate Program in American Studies and the Rutgers American Studies Student Association at Rutgers-Newark invite proposals for panels, papers, roundtable discussions, workshops, screenings and multimedia presentations that illuminate the theme of “Public Scholarship and American Studies,” a conference to be held on our campus on Saturday, April 10, 2010 from 10am to 4pm.

Our conference will present and analyze public scholarship in light of multiple questions and perspectives. What is public scholarship? What is the place of the public in public scholarship? Who gets to speak as a scholar? What are the relationships among public scholarship and performance, artistic production and political activism? What are the local, metropolitan, national and transnational dynamics of public scholarship? How can local institutions, from museums to libraries to community organizations to houses of worship, become centers of public scholarship? How does the Web offer new venues and understandings of public scholarship?

What distinguishes public scholarship produced in the spirit of American Studies? What special challenges emerge when public scholarship engages contemporary issues or the distant past? How does public scholarship relate to the many fields that contribute to American Studies, such as history, the arts, literature, ethnic studies, women’s studies, gender studies, African American studies, performance studies, Asian Studies, Latino/a Studies, queer studies, jazz studies, folklore, social sciences, cultural studies, political science, urban studies and oral history? How do these fields influence our understanding of public scholarship and American Studies? “Public Scholarship and American Studies” will embrace topics and questions that arise from local, national and transnational experiences. How do contemporary questions shape public scholarship? How do inheritances from the past influence public scholarship today? What is the role of public scholarship in sharply polarized pu
blic debates? What is its role in issues where there seems to be a consensus?

The conference also seeks to explore critical issues that particularly influence public scholarship. What are the tensions among commemoration, documentation, and analysis in public scholarship? How do funding sources influence museum exhibits? Who owns history? Is censorship a threat to public scholarship? What happens when cultural or historical tourism becomes part of economic development strategies?

We welcome presentations from all who share our interest in public scholarship, American culture and American Studies, such as professors, graduate students, independent scholars, artists, museum curators, librarians, archivists, educators, multimedia producers, and documentarians.

All submissions are due by Sunday, October 18, 2009.

Please complete the submission template located on our website: http://www.rutgerspublicscholarship.org/submission

Whatever the format of your proposed session, we will give preference to fully organized sessions that do not require the addition of moderators, commentators or presenters.

Our AV resources are limited. We will honor technology requests in the order they are received.

FREE REGISTRATION. Coffee, snacks and lunch will be served.

The Rutgers-Newark campus is conveniently located within a 10-15 minute walk of the Newark Penn Station, and is easily accessible by bus, car, and train from throughout the New Jersey/New York metropolitan area: http://www.newark.rutgers.edu/maps/
info@rutgerspublicscholarship.org
Email: info@rutgerspublicscholarship.org
Visit the website at http://rutgerspublicscholarship.org

Peter J. Wosh
Director, Archives/Public History Program
History Department
New York University
53 Washington Square South
New York NY 10012
Phone: (212) 998-8601
Fax: (212) 995-4017

http://history.fas.nyu.edu/object/history.gradprog.archivespublichistory.html