Public History Comprehensive Exams Reading List

Adopted Fall 2008

Educational Objectives for Comprehensive Exams

At the end of the reading period for the public history list, students must demonstrate:

q An ability to think critically about contemporary issues in the practice of public history. Candidates should demonstrate a mastery of key concepts including public trust, public domain, provenance, informed consent, visitor evaluation, shared authority, social construction of history, historical memory, historiography, preservation and material culture.

q A working knowledge of management ethics and legal issues relating to historical resources administration, including those handled by NAGPRA, the Historic Preservation Acts, ESEA and ADA.

q Knowledge of interpretive differences and the historiography of public history scholarship and the ability to apply that knowledge in solving contemporary problems in the preservation and interpretation of historic properties and artifacts both material and textual.

An effective essay will include:

q A well developed thesis

q Definitions of key terms

q Citations of multiple works by author and title

q Accurate, nuanced assessments of the scholarship

Reading List

Kenneth L. Ames, Barbara Franco and L. Thomas Frye, Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits (1992)

Gail Lee Dubrow & Jennifer Goodman, Restoring Women's History through Historic Preservation (2003)

Jennifer Eichsted and Stephen Small, Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (2002)

John Falk and Lynn Dierking, Learning From Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning (2000)

Tilden Freeman, Interpreting our Heritage (1967, 1984)

Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (1990)

James B. Gardner and Peter S. La Paglia, Public History: Essays from the Field (1999)

Hugh H. Genoways & Lynne Ireland, Museum Administration: An Introduction (2003)

Paul Groth and Chris Wilson, Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J.B. Jackson (2003)

Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (1997)

Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place:  Urban Landscapes as Public History (1995)

Amy Henderson and Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian (1997)

James Horton and Lois Horton, Slavery and Public History (2006)

Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory… (1991)

Mary Lawlor, Public Native America (2006)

James Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (1995)

James W. Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historical Sites Get Wrong (1999)

David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (1985)

Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison, American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (1997)

Kathleen McLean, Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions (1993)

William Murtagh, Keeping Time: The History and Theory of Preservation in America (1988)

Max Page and Randall Mason, Giving Preservation a History (2004)

Jules David Prown and Kenneth Haltman, American Artifacts: Essays in MaterialCulture (2000)

Tilden Rhea, Race Pride and the American Identity (1997)

Roy Rosenzweig and David Cohen, Digital History

Roy Rosenzweig and Warren Leon, eds., History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment (1989)

Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular History … (1998)

David Russo, Keepers of Our Past (1988)

Robert Blair St. George, Material Life in America, 1600-1860 (1988)

Harold and Susan Skramstad, A Handbook for Museum Trustees (2003)

John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 (1982)

Robert E. Stipe, A Richer Heritage: Historic Preservation in the Twenty-First Century (2003)

Norman Tyler, Historic Preservation: An Introduction to its History, Principles, and Practice (2000)

Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States (1998)

Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture (1986)

Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (1996)

Patricia West, Domesticating History: Political Origins of America’s House Museums (1999)