Booker T. Washington National Monument

Day-Tripping through Time: National Park History in Maryland and Pennsylvania

Inspired by the upcoming NPS centennial, which President Obama discussed in his most recent weekly address, I have spent parts of this summer posting about my visits to mid-western memorials, parks, and sites run by the NPS from central Ohio to eastern Missouri through a blog I named the National Park History Tour. Of course, one need not travel outside the Mid-Atlantic to learn about the past from the NPS, in fact one can cover over a century of American history in a weekend in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Levi Fox

Reconstructing Reconstruction: Post-Bellum Public History in the Smithsonian and National Park Systems

The September 2016 opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture offers a timely opportunity to evaluate how existing branches of the Smithsonian represent the era of Reconstruction, a period about which public opinion “matters more than most historical subjects” because “it forces us to think about what kind of society we wish America to be,” according to historian Eric Foner in a March 2015 Op-Ed in the New York Times.

Levi Fox