An amusing post arrived via the H-Public list this morning.[1] National Museum of the U.S. Army historian Glenn F. Williams forwarded “A Historian’s Code,” published in the Fall 2010 issue of Army History: Continue reading
Op-ed from today’s Montgomery Gazette
Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2010
In 2009, County Councilmember Mike Knapp proposed legislation to amend the county’s historic preservation ordinance. At the time, I was chairman of the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission and I provided vigorous testimony opposing the amendment and I wrote an opinion piece published in The Gazette [“Historic preservation: Who’s to decide?” March 11, 2009].
One of the designated properties I frequently pointed to at the time as a Montgomery County historic preservation success story was the property then known as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” I now know that some of what I wrote and said was wrong. For much of the 20th century, oral tradition in Montgomery County suggested that a small log building on the Old Georgetown Road property was used by Josiah Henson, the former slave whose autobiography inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Continue reading
6:40 AM is awful darned early to be doing phoners with public radio stations. This morning I was interviewed about Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Celeste Headlee, host of WNYC’s The Takeaway.
Yesterday’s Washington Post article on the site formerly known as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” spread globally at Twitter speed. Montgomery County’s 2006 purchase of the property is being painted by bloggers and reporters as incompetent at best and corrupt at worst. It is disappointing to see Montgomery County and historic preservation portrayed this way. Continue reading
The latest issue of the National Council on Public History newsletter, Public History News, arrived last Saturday. An interesting “Forum on Consulting” article starts on the cover and jumps through the back pages. The article focuses on the challenges and opportunities historians working outside the academe experience. Continue reading
Imagine using Foursquare for much more than leaving a digital footprint from your last evening on the town or lunch excursion. Using the social media site’s tips tool, researchers can find useful information about libraries and archives and other places in the field. Are you planning to visit the Library of Congress for a project and do you want to know which security checkpoints will get you in and out fastest? Or which reading rooms allow you to bring a briefcase or backpack? Do you want to grab a snack while in one of the LoC buildings? Continue reading
Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s is a new exhibit opening Saturday at the National Building Museum and running through July 10, 2011. The exhibit includes a section on a house built in the North Four Corners part of Silver Spring: Washington’s 1939 New York World’s Fair Home. As far as the available evidence suggests, the Silver Spring developers who received a license from the New York World’s Fair Corporation were the only ones who built an exact duplicate using the plans and material specifications for the demonstration home that was on display in the Long Island fair in 1939 and 1940. Continue reading
There are tough interviews.
And then there are ones that may seem impossible.
Like interviewing someone who believes he is from Saturn. Continue reading
I am catching a lot of flak over “blowing the lid off of Uncle Tom” as one colleague commented in an email earlier today. I suspect that I’ll be catching even more over the next week or so as various things work their ways through local newspapers. So why did I write what I did about the Josiah Henson Special Park (formerly known as Uncle Tom’s Cabin)? Continue reading
There’s new controversy heating up in Tenleytown at the site where a telecommunications tower company aborted construction of a 765 756-foot broadcast tower that would have loomed over a historic landmark and the Tenleytown neighborhood.
This morning I attended a blogging workshop at American University (#tbdau). Sponsored by TBD, the topic was finding your blogging voice and it gave me a chance to think about this blog and its antecedents. Continue reading