HIST 447 - Contested Heritage: Making, Shaping, and Fighting over Public History

3 credits

Description
The past – the received wisdom, values, and experiences that define a society’s heritage – takes a wide array of forms. Museums and museum exhibits, debates over the nature and placement of monuments, controversies surrounding school textbooks, the role of history in the entertainment industry (including theme parks, film, historical re-enactment, and video games), and historical symbols all form part of the tapestry of public history. This course seeks to explore how these different forms of history writ large shape our collective understanding of the past by celebrating, contesting, and exploiting elements of history, playing on a sense of nostalgia, and by connecting to a sense of collective identity.

Note
Open to graduate students. Graduate students are required to do additional work of a research nature.

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