Browsing by Subject "Public History"

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    The Guantánamo Public Memory Project: Exploring the Pedagogy of the Curatorial Process
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2013-04-05) Labode, Modupe; Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth
    In fall semester 2012, two graduate classes in IUPUI’s Museum Studies Program participated in the Guantánamo Public Memory Project (GPMP). Each produced digital products and a panel for the GPMP’s traveling exhibition about the history of the United States’ relationship with the Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba. This exhibition is the product of a collaboration among 11 universities. The class “Introduction to Museum Studies” is required for all incoming graduate students in the Museum Studies program, produced an exhibition panel on “The Arts of Detention” as a semester-long project within the introduction to museum history, theory, and ethics.. The “Guantánamo Project” class focused wholly on the GPMP and was comprised of students in the Museum Studies and Public History programs. In this poster, the class instructors will compare and contrast how students in the classes learned and applied the basic curatorial processes of creating an exhibition—research, interpretation, writing, image selection. The classroom products that will be considered include the exhibition panel, blog entries, digital projects, and student presentations at the December 2012 “Why Guantánamo” conference. The School of Liberal Arts student evaluations and the Museum Studies programs’ evaluations will be used to assess student perceptions and learning outcomes. Although many have advocated using exhibitions as a form of classroom practice, there is relatively little scholarship in this area. This poster will contribute to that scholarship.
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    HBO and the Holocaust: Conspiracy, the historical film, and public history at Wannsee
    (2016-12) Johnson, Nicholas K.; Haberski, Raymond J.; Carstensen, Thorsten; Cramer, Kevin
    In 2001, Home Box Office aired Conspiracy, a dramatization of the infamous Wannsee Conference organized by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann. The Conference took place in Berlin on 20 January 1942 and was intended to coordinate the Final Solution by asserting the dominance of Heydrich and the SS over other governmental departments. The surviving Wannsee Protocol stands as one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the Third Reich’s genocidal intent and emblematic of its shift from mass shootings in the occupied East to industrial-scale murder. Conspiracy, written by Loring Mandel and directed by Frank Pierson, is an unusual historical film because it reenacts the Wannsee Conference in real time, devoid of the usual clichés prevalent throughout Holocaust films. It also engages with historiographical arguments and makes a few of its own. This thesis argues that dramatic film has been relatively ignored by the public history field and uses Conspiracy as a case study for how dramatic film and television can be used to further the goals of public history, especially that of making complex and difficult histories accessible to wide audiences. Grounded in a thorough reading of script drafts, production notes, HBO meeting minutes, and correspondence, this thesis examines Conspiracy from the vantage point of scholarship in public history, film studies, and Holocaust studies. It details the film’s production history, the sources used for the film, the claims it makes, and advocates for dramatic film as a powerful public history outlet. Ultimately, this thesis argues that Conspiracy is exactly the type of historical film that historians should be making themselves.
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    The Labor Branch of the Office of Strategic Services: An Academic Study from a Public History Perspective
    (2007) Lynch, Doria Marie; Robbins, Kevin C.; Bingmann, Melissa; Barrows, Robert G.
    The first chapter of this thesis provides the background of the Labor Branch and the OSS as a whole. From the OSS’s inception in 1942 through its postwar transformation into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), I cover the evolution of the foreign intelligence community in the United States. This includes sections on the politics within the OSS, the reasons the Labor Branch has not been a focal point of OSS research, and quirks about the Labor Branch that make it stand out from the rest of the OSS. The Labor Branch’s specific role in the infiltration of Germany is also discussed in chapter one. Chapter two is an extension of the materials presented in the first chapter. It focuses on a section of the Labor Branch called Bach Section. This section was devoted to making the infiltration of Germany possible by creating cover stories, forging documents, and preparing agents to go to Germany in the midst of Nazism and be able to survive, gather intelligence, and create resistance networks. The bravery, intelligence, and will of the Bach Section are clear in this chapter, and the reader will recognize that, without the Labor Branch and their colleagues at the Bach Section, no one, be they with the OSS or British intelligence, would have had much success in infiltrating Germany during World War II. My third chapter is a bit more complicated than the first two. In it, I discuss the nuances of writing historical fiction responsibly and as a viable means of public history. As guidance, I undertake a discussion of the OSS in published works of fiction. I give an overview of the way different novelists handle the bureaucracy, agents, accomplishments, and failures of the OSS, revealing what I feel each does effectively and poorly. While discussing each of the potential strengths and pitfalls of historical fiction, especially as seen in the OSS novels, I then provide real examples of how historical fiction might work with a case study involving the OSS Labor Branch. One particular OSS mission, known as the Hammer Mission, serves as my example. I detail different parts of the mission, the men who participated, their training, and the mission itself and discuss how to use these details within a novel.