Browsing by Subject "Public history"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Entertaining the Public to Educate the Public at Conner Prairie: Prairietown 1975-2006
    (2010) Allison, David B.; Robertson, Nancy Marie, 1956-; Scarpino, Philip V.; Bingmann, Melissa
    The nexus of presenting an authentic environment and engaging audiences has been at the core of debate around living history museums since their inception in the 1960s. Conner Prairie's transition from a folklife model to a learning theory and research-based organization is traced in this thesis.
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    Multi-Generational Memory in Indiana: Oral History and the Use of Descendant Testimony in Holocaust Education
    (2025-01) Lawson, Ellie Audrey; Haberski, Raymond, Jr.; Kelly, Jason M.; Silverman, Lois H.
    The year 2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Holocaust. In the genocide’s aftermath, the state of Indiana became home to Holocaust survivors and – with time – their descendants. Indiana offered survivors a place to rebuild their lives. Unfortunately, our collective understanding of Indiana’s survivor population, their Holocaust experience, and lives in Indiana, has yet to be studied. The most significant challenge preventing that understanding is the lack of collection and accessibility to primary sources from survivors in Indiana public history institutions, namely oral histories. We must now – as a fast-approaching post-witness era arrives – investigate new opportunities to document the history of the Holocaust and its impact on Hoosiers. In this paper, I argue descendants of survivors can bridge the memory of the Holocaust to how Indiana can memorialize the Holocaust. The project, and this paper, centers around five second and third generation descendants and their recorded testimonies. By utilizing oral histories as a mechanism for documentation and storytelling, their testimonies offer an opportunity to strengthen Indiana’s historical record and Holocaust education. This paper identifies the process of conducting an oral history project including the scholarship which informs it and logistical preparation to record and preserve five oral histories. In the analysis of the project’s testimonies, themes of multi-generational trauma, memorialization of survivor ancestors, and identities of descendants illuminate the significant contributions of this project not only to Indiana’s memory, but rightfully adding to the growing studies on descendants in Holocaust studies and education across the United States. This paper provides a concise survey of the state of Holocaust education in Indiana and public history institutions who contribute to it. By identifying the contributions, the limitations of Holocaust education in Indiana – notably inaccessible collections of survivor testimony – prevent Hoosiers to participate in meaningful education and memorialization of Indiana’s survivor population. The project offers a foundation by filling a gap in Indiana’s historical record about the Holocaust and providing accessible, ready-to-use oral histories Indiana’s historians, educators, and the public can integrate in local efforts to teach, learn, and memorialize the Holocaust and Indiana’s survivors.
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    Playing patsy: film as public history and the image of enslaved African American women in post-civil rights era cinema
    (2017-12) Mitchell, Amber N.; Haberski, Raymond J.
    The goal of this thesis is to understand the relationship between the evolving representations of African American women in post-Civil Rights era films about the Transatlantic slave trade; the portraits these images present of black women and their history; and how these films approach the issues of difficult heritage and re-presenting atrocity in entertainment. Film shapes the ways in which we understand the past, leaving a lifelong impression about historical events and the groups involved. By analyzing the stories, directorial processes, and the public responses to four films of 20th and 21st centuries focused on the controversial historical topic of American chattel slavery and its representation of the most underrepresented and misunderstood victims of the Peculiar Institution, this work will argue that, when supplemented with historiography and criticism rooted in historical thinking, cinematic depictions of the past make history more accessible to the public and serve as a form of public memory, shaping the way the public thinks about our collective past.
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    Sites of Power and the Power of Sight: Vision in the California Mission Landscapes
    (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth
    The relationships of sight and power in the landscapes in California missions are explored in this study of three periods of mission history – the sites’ origins as the locus of colonial encounters between Spanish Franciscans and the Indigenous peoples of California, their later re- invention as public sites with “California mission gardens,” and contemporary tourist destinations. While seemingly disparate settings, this paper argues that the imposition of western power on Native peoples and the creation of romanticized oases in tourist destinations are parallel in a number of respects, particularly in the control of vision. The paper also explores diverse perspectives on this view of the land by examining indigenous ideologies of landscape and local expressions of meaning within garden design.