Overview 

Public history is any form of historical engagement that moves beyond the traditional classroom and scholarly publication, including monuments, museums, oral history, historical preservation, walking tours, as well as historically-engaged performance and documentary film. The Public History minor provides students opportunities to think critically about diverse modes of historical learning and storytelling and the many ways historical knowledge circulates in public life: Whose histories are privileged and silenced? What strategies can we use to uncover and share knowledge of the past? How does history shape experiences of identity and community? And how can public and community-engaged history help us to better understand society and politics today? 

Courses in the Public History minor emphasize applied forms of historical engagement by undergraduates. Students in public history courses, for example, might engage in hands-on archival research in Rare and Manuscript Collections, identifying and researching archival materials to produce a class digital exhibition. Students might learn and practice oral history methods, interviewing community members about their memories and experiences of particular events or movements. Students might work together to develop a physical exhibition from Cornell’s fashion and textile collections, thinking critically about how exhibitions build an argument from objects in ways different from an essay or book. More broadly, students learn to engage with the individuals and communities whose histories they are working to trace, to think about the personal and cultural stakes of historical knowledge. Through these embodied forms of historical engagement, students not only learn about the past but begin to ask larger questions about history as a process of knowledge production.

The Public History minor, while based in the history department, is also expressly interdisciplinary in scope, encouraging students to think comparatively about how different disciplines engage with history and memory.

Requirements

Students must take at least 5 courses from a list of courses that count, totaling at least 15 credits, including:

• At least 1 course from the list of core courses (lecture classes intended to introduce students to a wide range of public history forms, methods, and questions)
• At least 2 courses from the list of history courses (courses in or cross-listed with history). Core courses can count towards the two-history course requirement.

All classes must be taken for letter grades, unless classes are only offered as S/U. First-year writing seminars do not count for the minor. Only one class counted for the Public History minor may be counted for the student’s major or an additional minor. Transfer, advanced placement, or study abroad credits are not eligible.

Please complete the online application  or pick up a paper application on the fourth floor of McGraw Hall and submit to Judy Yonkin, 450 McGraw Hall.

Students may petition the Public History minor committee to have a course that does not appear on the list count towards the minor. Students will be asked to share the syllabus and explain how the course substantively connects to at least two of the four public history learning objectives.

In case a student’s schedule does not allow them to take one of the public history core courses, students may also petition to have a different class count for the core course requirement. Students will be asked to share the syllabus and explain how the course substantively connects to at least three of the four public history learning objectives.

Please email Judy Yonkin with questions about the public history minor.