Films about historical events have enormous power to affect us, both to enlighten and to mislead. Historical films are perennially popular, often because they tell history through individual lives, because they invent characters and add personal, emotional drama to events that we want to learn about. Those same fictionalizing qualities make them great tools for […]
The Public Archive
Doing History Online and In Public by Joan Neuberger Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students […]
Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles: A Public History Project
By Caroline Murray Los Angeles is a city famous for its Hollywood celebrities and traffic, but a new project reveals an often overlooked part of the city’s past and present: its indigenous population, cited as one of the largest among American cities. Mapping Indigenous LA (MILA) brings to life the histories and current dilemmas of […]
Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain, By Nancy van Deusen (2015)
Approaching a new set of questions, Global Indios has many surprises in store for the contemporary reader. The most prominent is the author’s concept of an “indioscape,” a cognitive mapping of the New World and its peoples.
Facing North from Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History
When William Strachey imagined Virginia’s future, he pictured Peru.