The speed-networking event is a popular regular feature of NCPH conferences. Photo credit: NCPH
It’s holiday time, and I’m turning from teaching and work to gift-giving. As in most years, my shopping includes making financial gifts to organizations I support. In the past, I’ve focused on political advocacy and service groups rather than professional societies like the National Council on Public History. I’ve tended to believe I’m already doing enough for them when I send my membership dues.
For some organizations, this may be true. But NCPH is different. As a board member, I’m intensely involved. But with Twitter, Facebook, the newsletter, History@Work, and pre-conference planning, I’m learning from my NCPH connections all the time. This organization—which sits at a crossroads of professional, political, and personal—is my year-round public history community.
Membership dues can’t fully support this “ungated community” that now distributes many of its benefits online, for free. These benefits advance our cause, but they aren’t created and maintained for free.
That’s why we need to put a price on what this “always-on” public history community means to us. It’s why we need to incorporate personal philanthropy into our commitment to this organization.
NCPH’s small, hard-working staff–shown here at the registration desk of the 2013 conference in Ottawa–helps keep people in the field connected. Photo credit: NCPH
Just this morning, I sent $250 to the NCPH Annual Fund to supplement the modest $70 dues I already pay. Compared to many other things I have spent $320 on this year, the value NCPH brings me seems more than worth this level of support.
A first step in building a culture of philanthropy is articulating, specifically, what the nature of that value is. We need to tell our “NCPH stories,” and in the coming year, the board will collect more of them.
My NCPH story starts in 2002, when, with a PhD, no job, and no idea how to seek non-faculty employment, I attended the joint Organization of American Historians/NCPH meeting in Washington, DC, to hear the many sessions about history practice and public history.
This conference profoundly shifted my thinking. The session I remember most vividly is Jay Price’s “Careers in Public History” workshop. Jay was so enthusiastic and welcoming—the embodiment, I later realized, of NCPH. As we perused public history job ads and considered how to articulate our abilities, I felt my professional world opening up.
Back in Chapel Hill, I was no longer a disheartened PhD with no marketable skills. I was energized with the realization that I had a lot to offer and that my historian’s skills were transferable.
Topics at the annual THATCamp NCPH are generated by participants’ questions and interests. Photo credit: Cathy Stanton
This insight proved pivotal. Two months after the meeting, my new perspective helped me land my first “alternate academic” job in university administration. Later, it guided me to find opportunities for contract work for the National Park Service.
In 2003, I skipped OAH and went to NCPH in Houston. In the years since, NCPH meetings have supplied the public history graduate training I never had. More importantly, the community has nurtured for me an expansive, exciting, creative vision for historical work that a purely academic frame had not provided.
Others have had similar experiences. Mary Rizzo recently shared her NCPH story in Public History News. In preparing this post, I asked other NCPH friends for their stories. Almost all of us recall how some key person welcomed us and how we felt our discovery of this organization as a homecoming. At the same time, for many of us, the benefits have become quite tangible.
from Kirsten Delegard:
My first NCPH conference was transformative. It introduced me to a group of digital historians who completely changed my approach to research and audience. Those conversations…launched me on an exciting journey that has just allowed me to secure a large grant from the state of Minnesota to do a public history project that explores the past in Minneapolis. I love the creativity, energy and openness of the people who attend NCPH. It’s so different from any other professional conference that I’ve attended. My time at these conferences leaves me inspired and energized to take a fresh approach to my work.
from Larry Cebula:
I went to Pensacola with mobile apps and history on my mind. I had been looking for a digital project that would both be public and would sharpen my students’ digital skills …I thought a mobile app for local history was the ticket… At Pensacola the excellent Suzanne Fischer invited me to dinner with some friends, one of whom happened to be Mark Tebeau who had actually developed a mobile history app (Cleveland Historical) and was at NCPH to see if anyone was interested in adopting his platform in another location. A few beers later, we shook hands and Spokane Historical was born.
As of today Spokane Historical has nearly 300 stories about historic sites around my community. It is an excellent digital training ground for my public history students. It has raised the profile of my institution. …[E]ach of my students graduates with a digital portfolio–and improved Google search results for their names. In fact one of my students went from being an assistant editor on Spokane Historical to winning a digital fellowship at the Library of Congress.
Like no other conference I know, the NCPH is about forming connections, and those connections have been tremendously valuable for my career.
from Julie Davis:
When I attended my first NCPH meeting, I knew I had found my people. …I love the mix of academics, teachers, scholars, students, activists, administrators—practitioners, professionals, public servants—public historians of every stripe, often many stripes in one. This conference brims with intellectual curiosity and passion for history. It is full of people researching important questions, working on interesting projects, and having an impact on the world. At the same time, it is refreshingly free of rank-pulling and condescension. NCPH-ers by and large are friendly, unpretentious, collaborative, and generous with their resources, knowledge, and expertise.
Working Groups at NCPH conferences have often led to publications, collaborative projects, and advocacy efforts. Photo credit: NCPH
Now it’s your turn to share your NCPH story below. Talk about colleagues who reached out and invited you to dinner or who listened and offered an idea. Tell us about a skill you learned or an insight you gained. Help us inspire each other to support NCPH so it can continue to be a welcoming, energetic, and lively center for all who desire to put history to work in the world.
~ Anne Whisnant is Deputy Secretary of the Faculty and Adjunct Associate Professor of History and American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also an active public historian with more than twenty years’ experience working on National Park Service-related projects, including, most recently, Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway.
