A Public History Student's Blog

     Today in public history class, my classmates and I discussed the topic of historical reenactment. In the United States and Canada, a lot of historical reenactment is focused on the military, portraying battles from specific wars in their history. In my view, this focus on military history, part of a broader trend in popular history, reflects these countries' national historical narratives. Most if not all countries have national historical narratives, stories about the past that are meant to strengthen their national identity. These stories are inherently problematic in that they generally sanitize a country’s history and present at best overly simplistic narratives of the past. In the United States, the country claiming its independence from Britain through victory in the Revolutionary War is part of this national narrative and is a popular subject for reenactment. Sometimes the connection between national identity, politics and historical reenactment is made explic...

When touring a museum, you may think that you have seen every object and room in the building, yet in fact, many museums have many artifacts in storage. It is not uncommon for the number of objects in storage to dwarf the number of objects on display. Especially in museums with larger buildings, there may be significant space set aside for staff work areas, offices and storage for artifacts and other stuff (furniture for events, seasonal decorations, etc.). It is also common for museums to have offsite storage for collections and other equipment. I previously worked at the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg, which had lots of non-public spaces, including basement workshops and studios for graphic design and collections care, in addition to offices and storage spaces. These spaces are important for the functioning of a museum, even if visitors may never see them. Many artifacts are kept in storage at museums as it is generally impractical to display them all, partly because of their s...

  My classmates and I have been starting to work on our project for Arva Flour Mill. We have decided that we are going to create an interactive timeline. We looked at materials from the mill at Western's archives last week and we are going to visit the mill itself tomorrow. In my spare time, I have been learning how to sew 18th and early 19th century clothing, mostly with youtube videos and other online sources. I really enjoy researching fashion from this period. I have already completed several projects, two neckerchiefs, a petticoat (worn as an outer skirt in this period) and a bedgown. I also have several projects in progress. Right now I am making a second bedgown out of linen. I found a linen dress at a thrift store a while ago, which had some bleach stains/fading at the shoulder, so I didn't feel bad about cutting it up. I have finished a large part of the bedgown at this point. Here is an image of the dress from ebay, I didn't take a picture before I cut it up but t...

          My name is Helen. I am currently an MA student at Western University in London, Ontario studying Public History. This blog is intended to chronicle my studies and what I am working on in my classes (this blog is one of my assignments). My classmates and I have a number of interesting projects planned for this semester. One of them is to research and create some sort of project to educate the public about the Arva flour Mill (the exact nature of the project is TBD). This mill in Arva, just north of London, has been around since 1819. Intrigued, I started some initial research online, which did yield some information about the mill, including who owned it, which is useful since the mill seems to have been identified on that basis, at least in the sources I looked at.           For those of you who are wondering what the difference between History and Public History is, the field of Public History focuses on teaching His...