Engaging the Past

Engaging the Past
Author: Alison Landsberg
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2015-06-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231539460

Reading films, television dramas, reality shows, and virtual exhibits, among other popular texts, Engaging the Past examines the making and meaning of history for everyday viewers. Contemporary media can encourage complex interactions with the past that have far-reaching consequences for history and politics. Viewers experience these representations personally, cognitively, and bodily, but, as this book reveals, not just by identifying with the characters portrayed. Some of the works considered in this volume include the films Hotel Rwanda (2004), Good Night and Good Luck (2005), and Milk (2008); the television dramas Deadwood, Mad Men, and Rome; the reality shows Frontier House, Colonial House, and Texas Ranch House; and The Secret Annex Online, accessed through the Anne Frank House website, and the Kristallnacht exhibit, accessed through the Unites States Holocaust Museum website. These mass cultural texts cultivate what Alison Landsberg calls an "affective engagement" with the past, tying the viewer to an event or person and fostering a sense of intimacy that does more than transport the viewer back in time. Affect, she suggests, can also work to disorient the viewer, forcibly pushing him or her out of the narrative and back into his or her own body. By analyzing these specific popular history formats, Landsberg shows the unique way they provoke historical thinking and produce historical knowledge, prompting a reconsideration of what constitutes history and an understanding of how history works in the contemporary mediated public sphere.

Engaging with the Past and Present

Engaging with the Past and Present
Author: Paul M. Dover
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2023-06-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000892875

This collection brings together fifteen essays from practitioners of a variety of disciplines that concern themselves with the past, not only historians, but scholars from other branches of the humanities and social sciences (including theology, art history, public history, and archival science) and natural sciences (including geology, paleontology, astronomy, and paleoanthropology). What is the relationship between the past and the present? This essential and seemingly straightforward question, of central importance to many fields of study, in fact yields a variety of answers, with significant repercussions for methodology, epistemology, and pedagogy. This volume’s contributors describe how they relate phenomena in the past and their observations of the present, revealing intellectual resonances and opportunities for dialogue across subjects that are too often walled off from one another. By engaging scholars in a conversation about a first principle of their work, this book offers a genuinely interdisciplinary consideration of a timeless question, with implications for knowledge about both past and present. Engaging with the Past and Present is full of insights and ideas for anyone seeking to understand the past or employ it as evidence for understanding present realities.

Dialogue with the Past

Dialogue with the Past
Author: Glenn Whitman
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2004
Genre: Oral history
ISBN: 9780759106499

Oral history is a marvelous force for empowering young people with a love of history. But educators today may wonder how they might use it to inspire their students while still teaching the necessary curriculum and meeting standards. In Dialogue with the Past Glenn Whitman addresses these concerns from his own rich experience and that of many other teachers and students. He helps readers understand the background and methodology of oral history, guides them in creating and conducting an oral history project in the classroom, and directly addresses the issue of meeting standards. Peppered with useful tips, examples from students and teachers, and reproducible forms, along with a comprehensive bibliography, this book will be a vital and inspirational tool for anyone working with secondary students. Visit the authors' web page

History in the Present Tense

History in the Present Tense
Author: Douglas Selwyn
Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2003
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780325005706

Table of contents

History Comes Alive

History Comes Alive
Author: M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2017-10-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469633876

During the 1976 Bicentennial celebration, millions of Americans engaged with the past in brand-new ways. They became absorbed by historical miniseries like Roots, visited museums with new exhibits that immersed them in the past, propelled works of historical fiction onto the bestseller list, and participated in living history events across the nation. While many of these activities were sparked by the Bicentennial, M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska shows that, in fact, they were symptomatic of a fundamental shift in Americans' relationship to history during the 1960s and 1970s. For the majority of the twentieth century, Americans thought of the past as foundational to, but separate from, the present, and they learned and thought about history in informational terms. But Rymsza-Pawlowska argues that the popular culture of the 1970s reflected an emerging desire to engage and enact the past on a more emotional level: to consider the feelings and motivations of historic individuals and, most importantly, to use this in reevaluating both the past and the present. This thought-provoking book charts the era's shifting feeling for history, and explores how it serves as a foundation for the experience and practice of history making today.

Introduction to Public History

Introduction to Public History
Author: Cherstin M. Lyon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2017-03-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1442272236

Introduction to Public History: Interpreting the Past, Engaging Audiences is a brief foundational textbook for public history. It is organized around the questions and ethical dilemmas that drive public history in a variety of settings, from local community-based projects to international case studies. This book is designed for use in undergraduate and graduate classrooms with future public historians, teachers, and consumers of history in mind. The authors are practicing public historians who teach history and public history to a mix of undergraduate and graduate students at universities across the United States and in international contexts. This book is based on original research and the authors’ first-hand experiences, offering a fresh perspective on the dynamic field of public history based on a decade of consultation with public history educators about what they needed in an introductory textbook. Each chapter introduces a concept or common practice to students, highlighting key terms for student review and for instructor assessment of student learning. The body of each chapter introduces theories, and basic conceptual building blocks intermixed with case studies to illustrate these points. Footnotes credit sources but also serve as breadcrumbs for instructors who might like to assign more in-depth reading for more advanced students or for the purposes of lecture development. Each chapter ends with suggestions for activities that the authors have tried with their own students and suggested readings, books, and websites that can deepen student exposure to the topic.

Engaging All Families

Engaging All Families
Author: Steven M. Constantino
Publisher: R&L Education
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2003-10-22
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1461663547

Families are a child's first and best teachers. A significant amount of research exists that strongly links the engagement of families in the educational lives of their children as a strong foundation to the successful achievement of all students. Educators cannot expect total engagement and high standards from students if both families and schools cannot form powerful alliances to guide those students to academic and lifelong success. Putting research into practice remains one of the most significant barriers to engaging families with schools. School leaders, already stretched thin, struggle to carve out the time and energy necessary to pour through research and create programs to promote family engagement within their school and community. As principal of a large, comprehensive, and diverse high school, Constantino solves this dilemma by providing a step-by-step process for practitioners to create family engagement programs at all levels. Engaging All Families provides a summary of research that acts as a foundation upon which the practitioner's tools are crafted. Readers are given the resources necessary to assess their present level of family engagement and the ideas, strategies, suggestions, programs, practices, policies, and procedures to implement a wide variety of customized family engagement programs. Numerous resources and references are also included. As a successful school administrator and nationally known expert in the field of family and community engagement, Steven Constantino builds the bridge from research to practice with Engaging All Families, and provides the information that allows all schools to become family friendly.

Understanding Music

Understanding Music
Author: N. Alan Clark
Publisher:
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2015-12-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9781940771335

Music moves through time; it is not static. In order to appreciate music wemust remember what sounds happened, and anticipate what sounds might comenext. This book takes you on a journey of music from past to present, from the Middle Ages to the Baroque Period to the 20th century and beyond!

Reckoning with History

Reckoning with History
Author: Jim Downs
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231549873

Reckoning with History brings together original essays from a diverse group of historians who consider how writing about the past can engage with the urgent issues of the present. The contributors—all former students of the distinguished Columbia University historian Eric Foner—explore the uses and politics of history through key episodes across a wide range of struggles for freedom. They shed new light on how different groups have defined and fought for freedom throughout American history, as well as the ways in which the ideal of freedom remains unrealized today. Covering a broad range of topics, these essays offer insight into how historians practice their craft in different ways and illuminate what it means to be a socially and politically engaged historian.