3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Twenty-first-century public history has expanded beyond the simple definition of "history outside the classroom” to include almost any effort to develop and communicate history-related content, from museums and historic houses to movies and social media, to inform, and even influence, audiences. This course provides a comprehensive overview of public history as a modern, engaging field of practice, with a skill-building focus on digital storytelling as the key tool for reaching existing audiences and building new ones. It is now a heavily democratic field in the sense that it can be practiced anywhere, by anyone — and therein lies additional challenges for museum and public history professionals. Consequently, we will cover the fundamental elements of practicing public history — including fundraising, governance, interpretation, and countering false narratives — while also introducing students to the process of digital storytelling, which merges the strength of visual and audio media with the power of narrative storytelling to produce informative and persuasive history-related content. By the end of the course, students will have a working knowledge of the ways that modern public history practitioners understand their roles and leave with a toolkit of new media skills to help them shape their own careers.