About This Project

Public history, at its broadest, is history about the public. It involves gathering, preserving, interpreting, and sharing information about the past. Yet definitions that general can be slippery. “History” and “public” are both contested terms—shifting, layered, and textured, just like the communities and source material they describe.

Public history is history about the public and, often, by the public. It lives outside the university classroom and beyond academic gatekeeping. It is found in streets and coffee shops, in rented rooms and vacant lots, in workplaces and backyards, and—most importantly—in the memories, emotions, and lived experiences of neighbors, strangers, co-workers, relatives, and friends. It is the history people carry and share long before it becomes archival.

Public history moves outward through traditional and non-traditional means: archives, web pages, museum exhibits, local and federal institutions, oral histories, photographs, newsletters, zines, documentaries, slide shows, and multimedia projects. It is an active, reciprocal process—history communicated between the historical object, the historian, and the communities who give it meaning.

In the United States, public history has long leaned toward white, middle-class, conservative perspectives. That is no longer a given. New interpretations of the past challenge the myth of objectivity and ask harder questions: Who tells the story? Who is heard or silenced? What histories shape how people live and move through the world? These questions matter because history is not neutral—it influences culture, policy, and daily life.

To call this account merely public history would be incomplete. It is also a history of resistance—a people’s history, in the Howard Zinn sense. Rather than reproducing conventional narratives structured around binaries and detached notions of neutrality, this work seeks a more grounded and humane understanding of the past. It centers the experiences, emotions, labor, and daily struggles of a particular community as they organized against discrimination and hate. In doing so, it aims to recover a history that is not only documented, but also lived—and still resonant in the present.