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This book chronicles a University of Alabama historian's efforts to engage public history over the course of a decade, highlighting personal and educational experiences inside and outside of the classroom.Each chapter reveals how Sharony Green, her students, and collaborators used various public places and spaces in Alabama, including the University of Alabama and Tuscaloosa, where she teaches, as “labs” to learn more about our shared past. Inspired by her familiar beginnings in a historic community in Miami, Florida, the author, a descendant of people from the American South and the Bahamas, unveils her encounters with the built environment, old documents and objects, motion pictures, music, and all kinds of historical actors. The book shares a variety of projects including exhibits and displays, images, videos, songs, and poetry, that serve as manifestations of her encounters with the places around her and her students. Together, these stories uncover an unexpected journey into public history, offering new ways to think about the field and humanities more generally.Teaching Public History Creatively in Alabama is an enlightening resource to both intentional and unintentional practitioners of public history, including scholars, students, and general readers interested in connecting with the past.

Exhibiting the Archive examines the role that exhibition plays in archives and analyses the impact they are understood to have on how users and visitors experience the archive.Drawing on research conducted in Europe, North America and Australia, the book analyses the key theoretical and social influences on exhibition-making in archives today and discusses the role of exhibitions in the archives of tomorrow. This is the first in-depth study to consider exhibition as more than outreach or advocacy: it frames exhibition as an encounter with archives and with people, and interprets it as a mechanism for change within the archive. Against a backdrop of increasing digital activity, Lester asks what experience within the physical space of the archive could be. Drawing on ideas of spatiality and embodiment, as well as social justice and activism, Lester considers the role of exhibitions within the physical archive and the part they can play in reshaping how experience is understood to happen within it.Exhibiting the Archive offers a new perspective on the archive that will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of archives and records. The discussions of cutting-edge practice offer new insights into how exhibitions are conceived and made, and will therefore be of interest to practitioners around the world.