Welcome to the Public History Concentration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

The Public History concentration within UNC Charlotte’s graduate history program offers students a unique combination of courses, as well as opportunities to learn new skills. In addition to our core courses in new media, historic preservation and museum studies, students may also take electives in other programs such as Public Policy, Architecture, and Arts Administration. The program’s new media focus (creating websites, CD-ROMs, digitizing images and collections) means that students will learn software programs that allow them to make multimedia presentations of their work. It also allows students interested in non-U.S. fields to create public history projects. Public historians with new media skills are very competitive in the public history job market; moreover, the combination of traditional history training with new media skills offers graduates a variety of alternative career choices in, for example, web development, public relations, and business. (Note: Students are not expected to have new media expertise upon entering the program.)

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PUBLIC HISTORY NEWS

Nicole Moore, a 2008 graduate of our public history program, received a 2011 New Professional Award from the National Council on Public History.  Nicole works for Historic Brattonsville in York County, South Carolina, where she is head of African American Interpretation at the antebellum site.

Dr. Dan Morrill and Public History won an SOTL grant this year to update our media lab with state of the art digital video cameras, microphones, tripods, lighting equipment, computer equipment  and Final Cut Pro software.  This will soon be available to public history graduate students working on video documentaries for the project component of their thesis.   Dr. Morrill will be teaching a History Documentary Video Production class in Spring of 2012 as the Public History elective.

In Spring 2010, Wells Fargo donated $10,000 to the Department of History to hire a public history graduate student to assist with research for the upcoming Wells Fargo Museum in Charlotte.

Brandon Lunsford, a graduate student in public history, authored the book Charlotte: Then and Now.  It was released by Thunder Bay Press in 2009.

"History at Light Speed: Discovering Charlotte's Northeast Corridor" has won the 2009 Student Project Award from the National Council on Public History.  Kristin Foster and Hannah Howard, who submitted the project on behalf of the Spring 2008 museum studies class that produced it, attended the NCPH annual meeting in April where they received the award.

"Students Explore History at Light Speed"

Please check out the online article about the public history project with CATS that is in the Summer edition of Exchange, the magazine for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.