I’ve been working in and around public history for nearly 30 years. As an undergraduate, I worked at the Center for Historic Architecture and Engineering at the University of Delaware. My job at that time was to measure and draw historic buildings for collections associated with the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record Divison of the National Park Service. After graduation from UD, I was hired on to a HABS/HAER summer team that surveyed industrial sites in southwestern Pennsylvania. This project led to a full-time (with benefits!) job at the main HABS/HAER office in Washington, DC, where I was assigned to research and write a detailed study of bituminous mining towns. The result, A Legacy of Coal: The Coal Company Towns of Southwestern Pennsylvania (1989), inspired me to pursue a doctorate. I went to William and Mary, which offered me an opportunity to emphasize public history as part of a degree program in American Studies.

Public History has remained central to my work in higher education. In my first position at UNCW, I taught Community Studies, created with my students an African American walking tour for the city, and served as public-historian-in residence to the 1898 Centennial Commission. At Marymount, I created an interdisciplinary public history minor, served on the board of the Black Heritage Museum of Arlington, conducted oral histories, created digital exhibits, and consulted on projects at area museums, including the NMAH. Here at JMU, I teach courses in public history as my adminsitrative schedule allows.

My current project is “Madison in the 1970s,” a series of digital exhibits created by students to explore the dramatic changes that occurred on this campus in that decade. You can find it here: http://sites.jmu.edu/mad70s. The Mad 70s uses WordPress, which offers an excellent platform for beginners. I describe the origins of this project in this short video, and show a behind-the-scenes-glimpse at the site dashboard: https://jmutube.cit.jmu.edu:8443/content/stoopsed/playlist/18560/play/

It’s amazing how much WordPress has changed the way I think about digital history. Years ago, I did a similar series of student-authored exhibits for The Black Heritage Musuem of Arlington. It can be found here: http://arlingtonblackheritage.org/. This site was complicated enough to require an expert graphic designer, Barry Erdeljon, a professor at Marymount University. My history students did the research and wrote the text, while he and his students handled the aesthetic and technical stuff. I don’t miss Dreamweaver and ftp at all!