I’ve always loved stories, which is a big part of the reason that I studied English in college. At the end of the day, history is just one big story. It’s about people. The triumphs. The failures. The discoveries. The risks. It’s all very relatable, even in a 21st century world. As a historian, you just need to know how to read your audience and how to help them make that connection to the past.
Although I studied English, literature is history. I added a Medieval and Renaissance Studies minor while I was working on my B.A. at Virginia Tech just so that I had a legitimate reason to take more classes on the era. I even audited both sections of Dr. James Robertson’s Civil War courses because I wanted to listen to his storytelling.
While pursuing my M.A. in Professional Writing and Rhetoric at GMU, I was simultaneously writing for the American Historical Association (AHA) in Washington, where I researched and published feature articles for their blog, AHA Today, as well as for their publication, Perspectives on History. My research encompassed new websites, podcasts, and teaching resources. I attended and reported on professional panels that discussed trending topics in the field, and I interviewed some of the leading historians in the Washington Metro Area.
It was really this research that inspired my master’s thesis on how historians are adjusting to an increasingly digital world, and how they are transitioning their work and research to accommodate a more contemporary audience. I explored the pedagogical extension of these online historical museum exhibits and the ways in which historians see their digital work aligning with teachers’ curricula. Much of my research centered on interviews I conducted with historians from the National Air and Space Museum, George Mason’s Center for History and New Media, the Civil War Preservation Trust, and the Clerk’s Office of History and Preservation.
I often joke that I’m a bit of a dinosaur with technology off the clock – I don’t personally like social media, and if it were up to me, I’d very much live John Prine’s “Spanish Pipedream” (Blow up your TV, throw away your paper, move to the country, build you a home…) – but I appreciate technology in the right contexts, including in the public history arena. I think that the field has tremendous opportunity to use digital innovation and creativity to engage with the general public, not just academics. My main goal with this class is to understand the actual logistics and methodologies needed to help local museums digitize their operations so that they can tell their story to a more wide-ranging audience than just their immediate communities.
