Curating America

Richard Rabinowitz has multiple aims for Curating America. He presents an autobiography, including his journeys as a public historian over the past fifty years. He also seeks to address the significant developments in public history overall in this time frame. For Rabinowitz, the visitor is the “heart of the museum enterprise” (p. 10). His preferred history museum is a place “where visitors actively and dramatically encounter the stories of past lives” (p. 11). He terms that landscape of engagement a “storyscape” (ibid.). The author organizes his book into four parts: Becoming a Pubic Historian; Finding Ourselves: Interpreting Place; Beholding: Interpreting Stuff; and Belonging: Interpreting Identity and Community; and concludes with a postscript. Enrolled in the Harvard University American Civilization Ph.D. program, Rabinowitz took a job at Old Sturbridge Village where he worked for seven years and found his true calling as a public historian. Along with the urban historian Sam Bass Warner, he established the American History Workshop (AHW) in 1980; it became his professional life, where he engaged in over 550 projects. He discusses several in this volume, and much can be learned from his accounts

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Biography · Civilization · Identity (music · Media studies · Public history · Sociology · Visitor pattern · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · History · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis