Announcing our spring 2014 grants from the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation
We are proud to announce the spring 2014 projects selected to receive funding from the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation.
IMPLEMENTATION AND RESEARCH GRANT
Was Sherman a war criminal? What is acceptable in war? On Saturday, May 31, C-SPAN 3 aired a talk given by History Associate Professor Anne Rubin at the U.S. Capitol Historical Society that discussed such questions. For more, see http://umbcinsights.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/anne-rubin-history-on-c-span/
Denise Meringolo, associate professor of history and director of the public history program at UMBC, recently sat down for an interview about her collaborative methods for training the next generation of public historians.
In this spring 2014 interview with Dinah Winnick, UMBC’s acting director of communications, Meringolo discusses the course that she designed through a BreakingGround grant. The BreakingGround program at UMBC was established in 2012 to foster innovative scholarship and provide opportunities for civic engagement beyond the university campus. Winnick notes that the grant program seeks to create projects that have a long-lasting and tangible impact in the community.
The university’s BreakingGround initiative resonates with Meringolo’s definition of public history. Rather than traditional, academic history with simply a different audience, Meringolo believes, “Public history is really an expression of public service.” She explains that teaching public history is all about “how the tools of history can be put to use not simply for a community but with them, embedded in their needs.”
Meringolo says that her goal for this BreakingGround project is for students to consider the role of public history in community development and historic preservation. Working with and for local organizations like Baltimore Heritage, a nonprofit preservation organization, students in Meringolo’s courses research and produce original content for the Explore Baltimore Heritage website and app. One cohort developed a tour of downtown Baltimore’s West Side while another produced stories about the city’s famed Druid Hill Park.
Through this collaboration, Meringolo and her students became aware that the public historian’s approach is not always what the partner envisions. For example, Baltimore Heritage’s audience of architecturally minded preservation experts anticipate reading a linear history of individual structures, not necessarily theme-driven stories about community residents. Fruitful collaboration required flexibility from Meringolo, her students, and the partners as well—which they have practiced through several rounds of the course.
Meringolo describes the benefit of this type of project as being two-fold: not only do students leave the course with a finished product for their professional portfolio, but they also gain awareness about issues facing historic communities in Baltimore City. Many students gain a sense of empowerment and investment in the city as a result of their research, continuing to communicate with Meringolo about these neighborhoods long after the semester has ended.
To learn more about Meringolo’s work, read her 2013 post on the BreakingGround blog, “Beyond Formal Politics: Scholarship as Civic Engagement.”
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Story by Max Cole
The Special Collections department of the Albin O. Kuhn Library, in partnership with the history department and the Center for Digital History Education, is happy to announce that the Joseph L. Arnold papers are now open for research use. The collection will be a valuable resource for researchers and students of Baltimore history.
The Joseph L. Arnold papers contain more than three decades of research on Baltimore history by the urban historian and longtime UMBC History Department faculty member. Within this collection are Dr. Arnold’s manuscripts for two works on the history of Baltimore, one organized chronologically and another thematically by ethnic/social groups. The bulk of the collection is Dr. Arnold’s extensive Baltimore subject files, mostly containing reproductions from 19th century editions of the Baltimore Sun interspersed with his hand-written notes on various topics.
Joseph Larkin Arnold (1937-2004) was a prominent urban historian and a key leader at UMBC for most of his career. Dr. Arnold joined the faculty of UMBC—then a very young institution—in 1968 after earning a PhD in social history at the Ohio State University. In his three and a half decades at UMBC, Dr. Arnold fulfilled a variety of campus leadership roles, including a term as Acting Librarian in 1979-1980.
For more information about the collection, click here.
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