Public Historians at Work

Send us Fan Mail The historic Black neighborhood of Houston’s Third Ward is home to two universities: the University of Houston (UH) and - right across Scott Street - Texas Southern University (TSU). The histories of these two educational institutions are intertwined, especially at the intersection of race and segregation within the city. Both were founded in the 1920s as junior colleges: UH for w...

Send us Fan Mail Step inside the Progressive Amateur Boxing Association, where the walls carry decades of history, pride, resilience, and community. In this special episode, graduate student Gabriel Griffin sits down with Coach Ray Martin Jr., who has spent 32 years carrying forward the mission his father began in 1969. Founded as a safe haven for Black youth during the Civil Rights era, the gym h...

Send us Fan Mail In this special episode, University of Houston graduate student Marquel Sennet takes us to church at the historic Wesley A.M.E. Church - a cornerstone of faith, community, and activism in Houston's Third Ward for more than a century. This church played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement, including the meeting where Heman Marion Sweatt agreed to challenge segregation...

Send us Fan Mail In this special episode, UH graduate students Valeria Gonzalez, Asher Gonzalez-Ortiz, and Amelia White tell the story of the Turkey Day Classic, an annual Houston football game between Third Ward’s Jack Yates High School and the Fifth Ward’s Phillis Wheatley High School that was played from 1947-1966. Relive the pageantry, parades, and excitement of the event billed as Houston’s B...

Send us Fan Mail Part of doing public history is exploring the ways in which moments of the past are disseminated and interpreted outside academia. In this special episode, playwright Nicole Burton and director Rikki Howie Lacewell sit down with Dr. Debbie Harwell (Instructional Assistant Professor of History, University of Houston) to discuss their stage adaptation of her book, Wednesdays in Miss...

Send us Fan Mail 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 neighbor...

Send us Fan Mail 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 th...

Send us Fan Mail 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 (Associa...

Send us Fan Mail 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....

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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)...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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, st...

Send us Fan Mail 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, st...

Send us Fan Mail 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, st...

Send us Fan Mail 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 communi...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 Harwel...

Send us Fan Mail 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 th...

Send us Fan Mail 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 H...

Send us Fan Mail 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 Tim...

Send us Fan Mail 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 –...

Send us Fan Mail 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 His...

Send us Fan Mail 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, th...

Send us Fan Mail 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 c...