Wednesday, April 18, 9:00 am — 5:00 pm

Limit: 75 participants
Cost: $30
Registration Ends March 15

THATCamp is an “unconference” that brings together history practitioners working in the digital humanities. Participants work on projects, solve problems, and share ideas in a day-long learning laboratory. Open to graduate students, scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, interested amateurs, developers and programmers, administrators, and funders from the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, the workshop emphasizes collegial work aimed at strengthening skills and projects directly applicable in participants’ own institutions and programs. Staff from the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) will facilitate. Started in 2008, the CHNM’s THATCamps have been enthusiastically received by participants at nearly sixty camps to date, and appear to be morphing into an international movement! The format dispenses with formal presentations and allows campers to design hands-on sessions around topics, tasks, or technologies of particular interest to them. The nonhierarchical, nondisciplinary, and project-oriented approach is ideally suited to the field of public history. Come for THATCamp NCPH, stay for the OAH/NCPH 2012 Annual Meeting! Graduate students and early career scholars can apply for $500 fellowships to help cover their costs of getting to Milwaukee for THATCamp NCPH. Application instructions and more information is available at http://thatcamp.org/. Download THATCamp Registration Form.

Organized by The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and the NCPH Digital Media Group

Thursday, April 19, 10:00 am — Noon

Limit: 25 participants
Cost: $15
Facilitator: Alexandra Lord, National Park Service

National Historic Landmarks are nationally significant historic places designated by the Secretary of the Interior because they possess exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States. Working with scholars throughout the nation, the National Historic Landmarks (NHL) program works to locate, research, and nominate properties to become landmarks. Properties achieve NHL status through a complex process that involves researching and writing an article-length scholarly assessment of the historic significance of the property. This workshop will teach scholars both how to prepare nominations for National Historic Landmarks and how properties are assessed. It will also provide skills which are in demand by many property owners and preservationists, as well as federal and state governments. After the workshop, participants will also have the opportunity to participate in a guided walking tour, which includes stops at National Historic Landmarks and sites listed in the National Register of Historic Places in Milwaukee.

Thursday, April 19, 1:00 pm — 4:00 pm

Limit: 17 participants
Cost: $20
Facilitators: Kathleen Franz, American University
Michael Reuter, Milwaukee Historical Society
Carlene Stephens, National Museum of American History

How does material and visual culture make the histories of capitalism and democracy tangible, local, and accessible to a wide range of audiences from students to the general public? This half-day, hands-on workshop will introduce participants to the potential of using material and visual artifacts to document, research, and interpret the tangible histories of capitalism and democracy. The workshop will draw on artifacts from diverse collections at the Milwaukee Historical Society and will focus on the changing business, economic, and labor history of the city within a national context. Participants will receive a packet of readings along with a bibliography and list of resources on theory and practice of visual and material culture. This workshop will take place at the Milwaukee Historical Society.

Sponsored by the OAH Public History Committee

Thursday, April 19, 1:30 pm — 4:30 pm

Limit: 30 participants
Cost: $20
Facilitators: William S. Bryans, Oklahoma State University
Jon Hunner, New Mexico State University
Ann McCleary, University of West Georgia
Constance Schulz, University of South Carolina, Emeritus

Designed for both faculty members and department chairs, this workshop will explore the challenges of tenure and promotion for publicly engaged scholars. The workshop will begin with discussion of the recent Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian, approved by NCPH, OAH, and AHA, as well as examples of how these guidelines have been utilized in several departments. Participants will then break into smaller groups, each with a workshop leader, to share and discuss the application of these guidelines in a faculty member’s tenure and promotion portfolio and how one might best craft a narrative to reflect the work that public historians undertake. One break-out group will include department chairs to consider the challenges of evaluating publicly engaged historians. The last part of the workshop will bring all participants together for an open discussion about what they have learned and to provide closing comments from the workshop leaders.

Sponsored by the NCPH Curriculum and Training Committee

Friday, April 20; 8:00 am — 3:00 pm

Cost: $20 half-day, $30 full-day
Facilitators: Megan Falater, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Stephen Kercher, University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh and Black Thursday Oral History Project
Mike Lawler, Wisconsin Story Project
Jim Leary, University of Wisconsin—Madison
John Mann, University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire
Linda Middlestadt, History Center and Archives
Troy Reeves, University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee
Charles Lee, University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire

Part I: Oral History: A Tool for Research, Tool for Life
This workshop offers an introduction for students, teachers, public historians, and community members who seek to use oral history. It will focus on the “3 C’s” of an oral history project: collecting, curating, and communicating. Within these three broad themes, the following subtopics will be featured: project design, ethical and legal issues, interviewing techniques, processing and archiving, recording equipment, and public programming. Central to workshop discussions will be the impact of the digital age on all facets of the oral historian’s craft. Workshop attendees will have the opportunity to address issues specific to their prospective projects. Participants will be given materials that will help them apply what they learn effectively and efficiently.

Part II: Using Oral History: Roundtable of Examples from Wisconsin
The afternoon will be devoted to individuals and groups from throughout Wisconsin to discuss their past and current oral history projects. They will provide specific attention to both the process of collecting and curating, as well as communicating (presenting) their results to the public. This session will provide time for presenters to offer some more formal thoughts on their project while leaving ample time for the audience to interact with them in the traditional question and answer and in “speed networking” formats.

Sponsored by the OAH Committee on Public History

Friday, April 20; 8:00 am — 2:00 pm

Cost: $20 includes breakfast and lunch
Facilitators: June Klees, Bay College
Maryellen H. McVicker, Moberly Area Community College
James Ross-Nazzal, Houston Community College
Luncheon Address:Steven Lawson, Rutgers University

Part I: Why History? Developing a Subject-Value Pedagogy for the Survey Class demonstrates how to increase student engagement in and ownership of their survey-level history classes. The topic will appeal to community college faculty and any others teaching history surveys, online and on campus.

Part II: The History of Magnolia Park, Houston, Texas: Using Local and Ethnic History from the Research Phase to Publication in Facilitating Community History, Historical Research, and Historical Writing in Community College US History Survey Students
Professors and their students at Houston Community College are researching, writing, and will be publishing a history of Magnolia Park. Magnolia Park was a white-only, upper-middle-class suburb of Houston in the early twentieth century. Due to the expansion of the Houston Ship Channel in the interwar era and due to the Mexican Revolution, Magnolia Park attracted thousands of Mexican immigrants. By World War II Magnolia Park had been annexed by Houston and was Houston’s largest Hispanic neighborhood. This workshop will introduce some of the ways that ethnic, community, and public history can be incorporated into the US survey courses to increase student success and student retention.

Part III: George Caleb Bingham: An Example of Frontier Capitalism and Democracy
This presentation will concentrate on the American frontier artist George Caleb Bingham, who has been the subject of much new research in 2011 on the 200th anniversary of his birth. Internationally known for his portrayals of the American frontier, Bingham was determined to be a financial success as well as a fantastic painter. He struggled to achieve this goal in a world where photography made obsolete his main source of revenue (painting portraits). He turned to politics and became the state treasurer of Missouri during the Civil War. Coming from a southern background he nonetheless was an ardent support of northern ideas. Bingham is an example of American capitalism on the individual scale.

Luncheon Keynote Address: “How Long, Not Long: The Short Civil Rights Movement”
Steven Lawson, Rutgers University
Steven F. Lawson is a professor emeritus of American history at Rutgers University and previously taught at the University of South Florida, Tampa, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author, most recently, of Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America since 1941 (3rd edition, 2009). Lawson has served as an expert witness in several voting rights cases and as an academic adviser to parts one and two of the award-winning PBS television documentary, Eyes on the Prize.

Saturday, April 21; 10:00 am — Noon

Limit: 30 participants
Cost: $15
Facilitators: Lee Ann Potter, National Archives and Records Administration

In this workshop, participants will learn about the education programs and digital initiatives currently underway at the National Archives of the United States. Specific focus will be on the new www.DocsTeach.org Web site. The site combines primary source content with the latest interactive capabilities of the Internet. Not only does the site invite educators to explore thousands of documents in a variety of media from the holding of the National Archives, it also allows teachers to combine these materials using clever tools to create engaging activities that students can access online. The seven tools featured on the site are designed to teach specific historical thinking skills—weighing evidence, interpreting data, focusing on details, and more. Each employs interactive components that both teachers and students can tailor to their needs. On the site, teachers can 1) browse or search for documents and activities, 2) customize any activity to fit the needs of a unique classroom, 3) create a brand new activity with its own web address from scratch, and 4) save and organize activities in an account to share with students. After participating in an activity, the site even allows students to submit their work to their teacher via e-mail.

Sponsored by the OAH Committee on Public History and the National Archives and Records Administration

Saturday, April 21; 1:30 pm — 4:30 pm

Limit: 25 participants
Cost: $20
Facilitators: Rachael Bussert, Northern Michigan University
Marcus Robyns, Northern Michigan University

In this workshop two archivists from Northern Michigan University will discuss the process of implementing a large-scale digitization project from the grant-writing process to Web delivery. The first part of the workshop will be a discussion of standards and methodology of the digitization project process. The workshop will begin with a discussion of project selection and practical grant-writing advice followed by digitization standards, equipment, and Web delivery. The discussion will end with a dialogue about Web site evaluation tools and free Web 2.0 tools that can be used to promote your project. Discussion will be followed by a demonstration of scanning and quality control of historic documents. In the final part of the workshop participants will work in groups to create small online exhibits with digital images provided by workshop leaders. Participants will need to provide their own Wi-Fi enabled laptops with the ability to connect to Wi-Fi connections for this workshop. No previous Web design experience required.