Making History Public

"The professional study of history has---and should have---a robust life outside of the ivory tower. The H. Duane Hampton Public History Program prepares students to work in the vibrant, growing field of public history, which fundamentally seeks to make the past relevant and accessible to the wider public." 

Public history includes a broad range of opportunities and mediums including museum and archival study, story-telling and oral history, public outreach, public policy analysis and many more. Students who pursue public history over the course of their education are well prepared to tackle a variety of work and academic spaces.

The Public History Program at the University of Montana offers an undergraduate certificate the connects students with relevant coursework and internships to develop essential skills for both the academic and professional world. Among many others, students in the program take classes ranging from oral history and storytelling to archival work and even working with the Humanities Institute to connect Missoula's on-campus humanities work with the community. A graduate certificate is forthcoming.

Through the NEH American Recovery Act Grant, the History Department achieved several milestones, including: 

• offering a series of grant-funded undergraduate courses. Professor Leif Fredrickson taught HSTR391: Plague, People & the Environment (Spring 2022) and HSTA391: Hell on Wheels: The Automobile in U.S. History (Fall 2022). Professor Claire Arcenas converted her course, HSTA 275: Making History Public, into an online course and taught it during the Spring 2023 semester. 
• guiding students through an oral history project with our course HSTR370: Practicing Oral History with Professors Jody Pavilack, Kyle Volk, and Wade Davies. Students conducted some 50 oral histories with rural residents, Asian Americans, and Native Americans living in western Montana. The oral histories are being processed by the Mansfield Library Archives to be made accessible to researchers and the public. 
• hosting a one-week summer humanities institute for high school students in June, 2022. Professor Claire Arcenas spearheaded the effort with assistance from Professor Eric Zimmer and graduate student teaching assistant Michael Larmann. The institute involved a dozen local high school students who spent a week with faculty learning about the history of the Missoula Valley. Thanks to generous contributions from alumni and on the strength of this first (grant-funded) program, we’ll be holding a second summer institute in June 2023. 
• creating a new public history website—makinghistorypublic.com—to spotlight the work of students and faculty in our public history program and to reach a wider audience. The website is set to go live soon. This process included developing a plan and hiring a web designer to execute the plan. We purchased a domain name and hardware (computer, software, camera, monitors). We hired a public history student intern who created content for our website. 

For more information regarding completed and ongoing public history projects at UM, internship opportunities, and additional program information, please visit the UM Department of History Public History website here!