Public History

This episode of Humanities Viewpoints, our first for 2015, is about Public History. Academics engaging and working with public audiences is getting a good deal of attention. The annual meeting of the American Historical Association earlier this month included a panel session called, “Being a Public Intellectual: Historians and the Public.” Also, just this past December, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced the creation of their new “Public Scholar Grant Program” that encourages the publication of nonfiction books that apply serious humanities scholarship to subjects of general interest and appeal. Dr. Lisa Blee, Assistant Professor of History at Wake Forest University, joins me today to talk about Public History, the background of the field, as well as her definition and how it applies to her teaching.blee23 Dr. Blee will also talk a bit about the upcoming exhibition, Release: From Stigma to Acceptance. This exhibition features the words and art of formerly incarcerated offenders and was a collaboration between Project Re-entry program graduates, Wake Forest University students in Dr. Blee’s course Issues in Public History (HST 367), and Project Re-entry coordinators during the Fall 2014 semester. The exhibition opens this Saturday, January 17th at the Sawtooth School for Visual Art with an opening reception from 1-3pm. Enjoy refreshments and music while learning about the history of incarceration, stories of re-entry, and the background of the exhibit. Lisa Blee grew up in Arizona, attended college in Portland, Oregon, and received her PhD at the University of Minnesota. She joined the Wake Forest faculty in 2009 and teaches courses in the U.S. West, Native American history, environmental thought, and public history. Her research interest is in historical memory and late-nineteenth and twentieth century Pacific Northwest Indigenous history. Her first book is Framing Chief Leschi: Narratives and the Politics of Historical Justice (2014, University of North Carolina Press). I hope you enjoy our conversation.