The classes I took as a graduate student have informed my academic, professional, and personal views on the job of the public historian and the important role academia has in professional development. These are some of the courses and related classwork I found especially helpful.

Public History Seminar
Instructor: Dr. Debbie Doyle
This course served as an introduction to public history, grounding us in the theory and debates of the increasingly diverse field of public history. In addition to classwork, I also took the option to volunteer 35 hours at a local historic site, with the National Park Service at Arlington House: The Robert E. Lee Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. Through this class I was introduced to the practice of interpretation and saw first-hand the importance of educating the public. This experience set me on the career path I’m now following.

Public History Practicum
Instructor: Dr. Kathleen Franz
Writing Sample: “Home At Arlington House” A Teaching with Historic Places Lesson Plan
This practical class is the second of the two-part required Public History introduction, this time focusing on best practices, especially in interpretation, visitor experience and evaluation, and education. The accompanying writing sample is the final project and central part of the cours:, creating, with an outside institution, an interpretive project. I worked with my classmate with Arlington House: The Robert E. Lee Memorial, to create this ready-to-use lesson plan following the guidelines of the Heritage Education Services program Teaching with Historic Places.

Oral History
Instructor: Dr. Pamela Henson
This class discussed the theoretical, ethical, and practical considerations when doing oral histories. In addition to these discussions, I conducted two professional oral history interviews with my grandmothers about their experiences growing up as Jewish girls in Brooklyn and northern New Jersey. These interviews were accompanied by a paper, “The Assimilation of America’s New Jews,” about the experiences of Jewish women. (These documents are unavailable at this time.)

History in the Digital Age
Instructor: Jeremy Boggs, Creative Lead at Center for History and New Media at George Mason University
Project: See Tool of Research
Learning how to use social media and other digital tools in this class is perhaps one of the most useful things I’m taking away from this entire experience, and the skills that seem to make possible employers the most excited. This class opened my eyes to the necessity of using the Internet to connect sites and museums with the public. Before taking this class I had used tools like blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and de.lic.ious for myself, but had never really thought of using them to engage with the public. For more about my work in this class, and a use of these skills outside my classes, see tool of research.

Historic Site Management
Instructor: Dr. Paul Reber, Executive Director at Stratford Hall
This class introduced me to the administration of historic sites and history museums. The topics covered included legal and ethical issues, strategic planning, organization, management, and marketing. It gave insight into the way museums and historic sites work, which is not something you can always get through a book, especially the challenges they face in today’s tough economy.

Visual and Material Culture
Instructor: Dr. Kathleen Franz
Writing Sample: “For Everything A Season: Jewish Ritual Art in Cleveland“  Exhibit Review
Writing Sample: “The West in the Capitol Rotunda: Nationalism and Racism in Early 19th Century Art”
Project: Capitol Art: Teaching the Art of the Rotunda for Fifth Graders
This class focused on using non-traditional sources in history, sources that are especially helpful when studying the lower classes, minorities, women, and other groups who left little written records of their presence.  Though each a field in their own right, this class covered both material and visual culture, using both of these to study nation building, technology, landscapes, consumer culture, religion, reform, and propaganda. The first writing sample is a review of an exhibit put on at Cleveland State University entitled For Everything A Season , which used both the website and the exhibit catalogue. It was accompanied by a presentation to the class in conjunction with a case study on Christian material culture. The second writing sample is the explanatory paper submitted with the Capitol Art project. It explains some of the reasoning behind the website, as well as context in the scholarly literature.

Colloquium in United States History I
Instructor: Dr. Andrew Lewis
Writing Sample: “The United Front: Evangelical Protestantism and Abolition Among Women in the Antebellum North”
This class was a traditional historiography seminar rather than a public history class. Dr. Lewis covered many topics relating to the years 1607-1865. In-class reading focused especially on more recently written works, and members of the class provided book reviews and in-class presentations of important or classic texts as well as those that covered different aspects of the same theme or time period. The writing sample accompanying this class is the final paper, a historiography, or overview of the scholarly literature about a topic. This paper is on the relationship between evangelical religion, abolition, and the role of women in the North in the first half of the 19th century.

Research Seminar
Instructor: Dr. Max Paul Friedman
Writing Sample: “Captivity In Print: Indian Captivity in the Urban Public Discourse of the French and Indian War”
The goal of research seminar is to produce an article-length paper which could be submitted to an academic journal for publication. This paper looked into secondary literature on English-Indian relations, captivity, and captivity narratives in colonial America. It also utilized the Readex databases Early American Newspapers and Early American Imprints, collections of printed materials,  for primary sources.