Welcome to the Finding History blog: a way for the public history community — and that’s all of us, of course– to share things about history and memory in contemporary culture. At its simplest, it’s “history in the news”– the “uses of the past” by politicians, media figures, artists, pundits, government officials, theme-park and restaurant designers, merchandisers–really, just about anybody–to re-deploy the past to address current concerns or promote current agendas. News about monuments, memorials, commemorations; news about echoes of the past in the present; news about debates over the meaning of the past; news about preserving the past– in museums, historic sites, urban renewal projects, re-enactments, archives, libraries, schools.
You can find “history” at every turn– Finding History is a site for scrutinizing those sometimes surprising eruptions of the past in contemporary public discourse, asking how — and why– those parts of the past are emerging right now.
Anything goes here: newspaper “clippings,” TV shows, movies, speeches by political figures, Internet “memes,” popular culture happenings, etc. etc. etc.
Civil War re-enactors posing with a US Army tank
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