AMST 3001 Hands-On Public History (undergraduate course)

Tuesdays from 3:30pm - 6:00pm in New Cabell 068.

Some undergraduate course offerings can count toward your elective requirement, but that depends on the department and professor. If you'd like to take this course, contact the professor to see if they would allow you to take it and what they would require of your work in the course to ensure it counts at the graduate level.

Public History is history that is delivered to a popular audience of non-scholars, often at historic sites, museums, and, more recently, via digital tools and websites. This course will introduce students to the issues and goals that have shaped public history as a scholarly discipline, but the focus of the course will be on the contemporary practice of public history, with a focus on the public history of slavery.

Field trips to local sites and a final class project involving field work in several Reconstruction-era African American cemeteries are major components of this course. Readings, assignments, and tours of local historic sites will investigate the range of scholarly issues most relevant to the practice of public history today. Those include the challenges of presenting slavery as public history; enlarging the scope of historic sites to include the less powerful, especially women and enslaved workers; and ongoing debates about the difference between history and heritage. Who is the “public” in public history? Whose history gets told, and how? Throughout the semester, students will work closely with the librarians and curators at Special Collections; the GIS specialists in Scholars’ Lab; and community members from Buckingham County to research and present hidden or erased histories of African American life in the nineteenth century.

Tours of local historic sites and museum exhibits are a key element of this class. This semester, students will visit Monticello; Montpelier; take the African American History Tour of UVA led by the University Guide Service; and do a self-guided audio tour of the Daughters of Zion Cemetery in downtown Charlottesville. 

In  spring 2020 the final project will likely focus on the African American history of the Union Hill and Union Grove communities in Buckingham County. (If not Buckingham County, then we will do a similar project in Louisa County or Albemarle County.) We will do fieldwork in several cemeteries there, using ArcGIS technology to geolocate information about cemeteries, and the Story Map software to create layered digital narratives about people (living and dead), events, and places. We will also hold a community event in Buckingham County. You will present your final project, a Story Map, at the final class.