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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The most recent racial justice movement that emerged in the United States beginning in the summer of 2020 in response to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd laid bare the overdue need to revisit white America’s legacy of racist violence against its Black citizens. Historians can help bridge the gap between past and present and urge more Americans to identify and confront racial violence. As a born-and-raised Hoosier, I wanted to contribute to social change and racial justice at home. The historical silence on the history of racist violence in Indiana supports the myth that Indiana was a free state where Black citizens found refuge from the racist violence they experienced in the South; thousands of primary source newspapers containing details of white perpetrators lynching and violently attacking Black Hoosiers refute this myth. This paper identifies white perpetrators’ acts of anti-Black violence and Black Hoosiers resistance to anti-Black violence throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This analysis of racial violence in Indiana shows that white perpetrators employed violence in defense of white supremacy and that Black Hoosiers resisted anti-Black violence and white supremacy. The record indicates that racial terrorism has been embedded in the fabric of Indiana since its founding. Grassroots efforts, such as the Facing Injustice Project’s work to acknowledge the 1901 lynching of George Ward in Terre Haute, Indiana, are starting to recognize the harm white Hoosiers did to Black Hoosiers and bring repair to victims’ descendants and communities. More public history projects are needed to engage all Hoosiers in reckoning with the history of anti-Black violence. Activists and organizations have shown that Wikipedia is one digital institution where anyone can do the work of rooting out inequalities and injustices. This digital public history Wikipedia project challenges the historical silence on Indiana’s racially violent past by telling the truth about the history on one of the most-visited websites in the world. Using Wikipedia to do public history invites Hoosiers of all backgrounds to take up the work of acknowledging Indiana’s history of anti-Black violence, updating the historic record, and reevaluating the narrative constantly.

Historic house museums are the focus of an ideological tension between preservation and interpretation within the public history community. At a time where many house museums are failing, preservationists advocate for solutions to the house museum dilemma focused on saving the building. Historians and other museum professionals point to the importance of the value of the collections, memories, and documents preserved within the house as critical tools for understanding and teaching American history. Of specific focus in this thesis is the role gender influence played in the formation of historic house museums and how an examination of its continuing effect on agency within heritage sites creates access points for cutting-edge public history and interpretation. This is done through a case study of the history of the Jacobsburg Historical Society's Boulton Historic Site in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. The site was the location of the Boulton Gun Works, built in 1812 by the Henry family, manufacturers of the Pennsylvania Longrifle and key members of the early industrial community of Jacobsburg, located just north of the Moravian community of Nazareth. / History

This thesis tells the previously untold story of how environmental activists in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in the 1980s waged a nearly decade-long and ultimately losing battle against a plan to pump water from the free-flowing Delaware River. As a case study of grassroots community activism during the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan, the struggle known locally as “Dump the Pump” and spearheaded by a nonprofit organization called Del-AWARE supports and provides a regional take on recent scholarship that has illuminated the vibrant underlying dynamics of local civic engagement occurring amid the overshadowing political conservatism of the Reagan years. Also a case study in public history, this thesis demonstrates how collective historical memory fueled not only Del-AWARE’s protracted struggle, but its enduring legacy in public policy and community life. It concludes with suggestions for preserving the history of Del-AWARE before it is lost forever. / History

Affiliates of the United States settlement house movement provided a historical precedent for engaged, community-centered museum practice. Their innovations upon the social survey, a key sociological data collection and data visualization tool, as well as their efforts to interpret results via innovative, culturally democratic exhibition techniques, had a contemporary impact on both museum practice and the history of social work. This impact resonates in the socially-responsive work of community museums of the recent past. The ethics of settlement methodology- including flexibility, experimentalism, empathetic practice, local community focus, and social justice activism- foreshadow the precepts and practices of what is now known as public history. / History

The Philadelphia Public History Truck is a nearly two-year-old mobile museum project which creates interdisciplinary exhibitions about the history of Philadelphia neighborhoods with those who live, work, and play within the places and spaces of the city. Since I founded the project in 2013, I have navigated partnerships with both grassroots organizations and larger institutions and faced a wide-ranging gamut of experiences worthy of examination by public historians concerned with power and production of history as well as practice-based reflexivity. The first half of this thesis documents my key reflections of the first eighteen months of work and serves as a primary source on the project. This paper also places History Truck into a long historiography of both public history and mobility in the United States of America to explain the emergence of what I am calling the New Mobile History, an emerging form of practice in which community members and public historians work together from the onset of project development using ephemerality and movement as a tool for creativity and civic-driven history making. By analyzing oral history interviews with Cynthia Little and Michael Frisch, I argue firstly that Philadelphia was the birthplace of this New Mobile History. Secondly, I posit that for this New Mobile History to continue evolving, public historians must balance digital work and relationship-based process to create exhibitions which directly serve communities of memory. Lastly, I consider one possible future for History Truck, including its transformation from project to nonprofit organization manned by post-M.A. fellows who have the ability to work passionately on city streets and with new media. / History

This research involves understanding the civic learning that emerged from the ways individuals in two civic action groups, Greenhill Historical Society (GHS) in Bonnybridge, a deindustrialised location, and Cumbernauld Village Action for the Community (CVAC) in Cumbernauld Village, a Conservation Area, enacted their citizenship through the spatial (geographical) and temporal (historical) characteristics of their place. I use a citizenship-as-practice conceptualisation, where citizenship is not a status ‘given’ to individuals who have successfully displayed pre-requisite outcomes, but is a continuous and indeterminate practice through exposure to real challenges. To understand the learning occurring for, from and through their practices, I used Biesta’s theory of civic learning (Biesta, 2011). It involves a socialisation conception of civic learning as the adoption of existing civic identities, where individuals adapt to a given political order, and a subjectification conception which focuses on how political agency is achieved. The theory connects learning and action together, where Biesta argues socialisation involves the individual requiring to learn something in order to carry out the ‘correct’ actions in the future; however, subjectification involves action preceding learning, where learning comes second, if at all. I used a case study design and a psychogeographic mapping methodology involving secondary data analysis, psychogeographic mapping interviews and observations. Civic action emerged as a more central component than civic learning through my empirical analysis. The civic actions of GHS emerged as a case of reconsideration (redefining, re-meaning their location through interventions in public), and CVAC of reconfiguration (actions physically altering the landscape). These actions concerning space and time involved spatial shifts from mapreading to mapmaking, and temporal shifts from histories ‘of’ and ‘for’ the public, towards histories ‘by’ the public. Respondents became ‘curators’ of their places: from spectators to participants in making and representing spaces and histories that opened their locations to interruptions of the continuities of time. Attending to practices of citizens with space and time contains possibilities for public pedagogies that work ‘with’ context rather than just ‘in’, towards opening up opportunities for citizens to ‘become public’ as practices that trouble pre-existing arrangements and configurations.

In 1942, in New Orleans a group of intellectual and artistic African-Americans, led by Marcus B. Christian, formed an art club named Les Cenelles Society of Arts and Letters. Les Cenelles members both looked to New Orleans’s Afro-Creole population as the pinnacle of African American artistic achievements and used their example as a model for artists who sought to effect social change. Many of the members of Les Cenelles wrote for the Louisiana Federal Writers’ Program (FWP). A key strategy the members of Les Cenelles used to accomplish their goals was gaining the support of white civic leaders, in particular Lyle Saxon. Christian and Saxon’s relationship was unusual in the 1940s Jim Crow era in the sense that it was built upon mutual respect and admiration. This thesis examines both the efforts of Les Cenelles and the black division of the FWP, as well as Christian and Saxon’s relationship.

Abstract The ultimate goal in the South was to end segregation, but nationwide equal-rights were the common goal of all African-Americans. Nonviolent protests and over aggressive police departments became the norm within the African-American community. Understated in the history of the Civil Rights Era is the role of armed resistance and Black Nationalism. Marcus Garvey, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, and Malcolm X were Black Nationalists that led the charge of Black Nationalism worldwide. The Deacons of Defense, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) and the Black Panther Party for Self Defense transformed the social makeup of the country and became major causes of the militarization of police departments across the United States. Many police departments across America began to create SWAT teams and use military-style weaponry following an outbreak of riots and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In New Orleans, Louisiana, stand-offs and shoot-outs with Black Panther members warranted a call for military backup, but it was the acts of Mark James Robert Essex that totally militarized the New Orleans Police Department.