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Welcome to “Public Historians at Work,” a podcast series from the Center for Public History at the University of Houston, Texas. Our vision at CPH is to ignite an understanding of our diverse pasts by collaborating with and training historically minded students, practitioners, and the public through community-driven programming and scholarship. In this podcast series, we speak with academics, writers, artists, and community members about what it means to do history and humanities work for and with the public. Check us out at www.uh.edu/CLASS/cph or find us on social media @UHCPHistory. Executive Producer: Dr. Kristina Neumann (kmneuma2@central.uh.edu)
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Send us a text In this special episode, Miranda Ruzinsky and Katie Truax – UH graduate students in public history – highlight the tradition of community support in Third Ward demonstrated through the institutions and public spaces associated with the funeral process. The role of black-owned businesses, churches and religious leaders, and public remembrance like murals are central to the neighborhood’s resilience in difficult times of death and grief. This episode was researched, record...
Send us a text All over the United States, communities and individuals banded together to support the country during the Second World War. Houston’s Third Ward was no different in this respect. In this special episode, UH graduate students Austin Lee and James Burke weave together accounts originally documented in the African American newspaper, The Houston Informer. From the men and women in the armed forces to the merchant marine sailing supply ships and the volunteers on the home front, Th...
Send us a text In 1977, thousands of women gathered in Houston, Texas, for the first and only federally funded National Women’s Conference (NWC) in U.S. History. Their purpose was to set and deliver an agenda to the president that would ensure that women’s rights would be a central focus in the wider human rights debate. The Sharing Stories from 1977 Project, led by Dr. Leandra Zarnow (Associate Professor of History, University of Houston) and Dr. Nancy Beck Young (Moores Professor of H...
Send us a text The power of an archive to elevate an underrepresented community cannot be overstated. Since the early 1990s, Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program ("Recovery") under Arte Público Press at the University of Houston has focused on collecting and making accessible the written legacy of Hispanic and Latino peoples from colonial times to the late 20th century. In 2017, this effort to expand the historical record of the US took new form with the establishment of the U...
Send us a text A historian and two engineers walk into a conference…. Rather than the start to a joke, this is a core component of the project, "Algorithms and Power Systems Architecture: Using Historical Analysis to Envision a Sustainable Future.” Led by Dr. Julie Cohn, a research historian (Center for Public History, University of Houston), and two electrical engineers, Dr. Daniel Molzahn (Assistant Professor in the School of Electorical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Tech) and Dr. Saira...
Send us a text Latino cARTographies is an interactive digital archive and exhibition reimagining Houston through an inclusive vision of Latino art, artists, and community. This project was developed out of the University of Houston’s Center for Mexican American and Latino/a Studies (CMALS) as the brain child of Dr. Pamela Anne Quiroz (Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of Houston). After hosting the 2019 Latino Art Now! - a national visual arts conference - Quiroz joined with Ju...
Send us a text In an increasingly digitized world, public historians have new opportunities to reach wider audiences than ever before. However, translating our work online for and with public audiences requires more than simply uploading essays and images. In this conversation among the directors of SYRIOS (recorded Fall 2023), we learn how a digital exhibit devoted to ancient coins from Syria experiments with new technologies and techniques from data science and digital media. Sp...
Send us a text Over the course of the 20th century, Houston evolved into a global city as immigrants from across the world came to call the city home. In this special supplement, undergraduate students from the University of Houston explore Houston’s undertold immigrant stories. Together, they reveal a range of experiences that uncover often overlooked textures of the city. In this episode, students recount the lives of Jewish-Latin Americans who settled in 1960s and 1970s Houston. The...
Send us a text Over the course of the 20th century, Houston evolved into a global city as immigrants from across the world came to call the city home. In this special supplement, undergraduate students from the University of Houston explore Houston’s undertold immigrant stories. Together, they reveal a range of experiences that uncover often overlooked textures of the city. In this episode, students recount the lives of Jewish-Latin Americans who settled in 1960s and 1970s Houston. The...
Send us a text Over the course of the 20th century, Houston evolved into a global city as immigrants from across the world came to call the city home. In this special supplement, undergraduate students from the University of Houston explore Houston’s undertold immigrant stories. Together, they reveal a range of experiences that uncover often overlooked textures of the city. In this episode, students recount the lives of Jewish-Latin Americans who settled in 1960s and 1970s Houston. The...
Send us a text In Spring 2022, Dr. Mark Goldberg (Associate Professor of History, University of Houston) decided to try something new with his undergraduate history course. As a way of enriching his students’ engagement with Jewish Latinx culture, Goldberg partnered with Holocaust Museum Houston to guide his class through the recording and archiving of six interviews with members of this community. A year later on November 28, 2023, Goldberg sat down with one of his undergrads, Miranda Ruzins...
Send us a text In the practice of public history, how the wider community receives a project is just as important as the intentions behind its creation. As work done for and with public audiences, the exhibits, media, and spaces we cultivate form a dialogue where agency is shared, emotions are welcome, and diverse experiences are honored. As Dr. Stephen Vider comments in Season 2, “I think that we place so much emphasis on the intellectual value of our research, but I think many people engage...
Send us a text In 2027, the University of Houston in Texas will celebrate its centennial anniversary. In honor of that upcoming milestone, the Center for Public History (CPH) partnered with UH Libraries and Houston Public Media to collect, share, and preserve stories related to the university’s legacy across one hundred years. On November 30th, 2023, the three project leaders – Dr. Debbie Harwell (Instructional Assistant Professor of History and Editor of Houston History magazine), Mary Manni...
Send us a text In 1977, over 100 people with disabilities and their allies occupied a federal building in San Francisco for almost a month. Part of the national 504 Sit-In, this remarkable protest sought to finally sign into law Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973), which would make it illegal for any federally funded facilities or programs to discriminate against individuals based on their disability. Not only was the protest successful, it paved the way for the passing of the Americ...
Send us a text What do millennia-old plagues have to do with the current COVID-19 pandemic? In this episode (recorded on May 11, 2022), Dr. Kristina Neumann sits down with Drs. Merle Eisenberg (Assistant Professor of History, Oklahoma State University) and Lee Mordechai (Senior Lecturer, Hebrew University of Jerusalem), late antique & medieval historians and hosts of the podcast Infectious Historians. Now with over 100 episodes, this dynamic series engages past disease outbreaks and conte...
Send us a text According to Dr. Stephen Vider (Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University), capturing feeling is just as important to public history as transmitting knowledge. Whether collecting an oral history or cultivating a museum exhibit, Dr. Vider emphasizes the ethical responsibility to honor people’s bodily and emotional responses to history. As he tells UH History graduate Timothy Vale (PhD, 2022) in their conversation recorded on May 6, 2022, valuing the full human experie...
Send us a text If a medical institution’s mission is to make cancer a relic of the past, the archivist’s role is to collect, preserve, and make that history available. So says Javier Garza, Senior Library Analyst and Archivist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Historical Resources Center in Houston, TX. In his interview with graduate student Allison Anderson – recorded on November 19th, 2021 – Garza describes how he got involved in the dynamic and communal effort to document and digitally di...
Send us a text There are many ways to produce public history, but one of the most unique publications comes from the University of Houston. Houston History magazine is a student-written and edited publication dedicated to the under-told stories of one of the largest and most diverse metropolitan regions of the United States. Join Dr. Debbie Z. Harwell (Instructional Assistant Professor of US History, University of Houston) and PhD candidate Caitlyn Jones for their November 8, 2021, conversati...
Send us a text With debates about healthcare dominating the news, the past resonates all the more. American historian Dr. Ronit Stahl (Associate Professor of History, University of California: Berkeley) clearly illustrates this principle in her conversation with Dr. Mark Goldberg on February 11, 2022. Whether understanding the 2014 Hobby Lobby ruling about the birth control insurance mandate, the claim of religious hospitals to conscience rights and public funds, or the Trump administration’s...
Send us a text Digital and Analog. Big data and Qualitative Research. Humanities and STEM. Activism and Academia. For some, these concepts may seem like polar opposites, but each is integral to the work of Dr. Merlin Chowkwanyun, a historian at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. In his conversation with Dr. Josiah Rector on Dec. 7th, 2021, Dr. Chowkwanyun details his varied career on the intersection of history, data, and health advocacy. From publishing online once secret...
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