Doing History Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture

Lonnie Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and Founding Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of how historians do history for the public.
During our exploration, Lonnie reveals why it’s important for historians to reach multiple audiences with their work and how museums allow them to reach those audiences; The importance of humanizing history; And, how history and the historian’s process helped Lonnie and his colleagues build the National Museum of African American History and Culture and interpret the history within it.

History has a history and genealogy has a history. And the histories of both affect how and why we study the past and how we understand and view it.
Today, we explore why it’s important for us to understand that the practices and processes of history and genealogy have histories by exploring what the history of genealogy reveals about the early American past.
Our guide for this exploration is Karin Wulf, a Professor of History at William & Mary and the Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

History tells us who we are and how we came to be who we are.
Like history, genealogy studies people. It’s a field of study that can tell us who we are in a more exact sense by showing us how our ancestral lines connect from one generation to the next.
In this episode of the “Doing History: How Historians Work” seres, we investigate the world of genealogical research with Joshua Taylor, President of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society and a professional genealogist.

What do historians do with their research once they finish writing about it?
How do historians publish the books and articles we love to read?
This episode of our Doing History: How Historians Work series, takes us behind-the-scenes of how historians publish their writing about history.
Our guide through the world of history publications is Joshua Piker, a Professor of History at William & Mary, and the Editor of the William and Mary Quarterly, the leading journal of early American history and culture.

How do historians write about the people, places, and events they’ve studied in historical sources?
We continue our Doing History: How Historians Work series by investigating how historians write about history. Our guide for this investigation is John Demos, the Samuel Knight Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and an award-winning historian.

What do historians do with all of the information they collect when they research?
How do they access their research in a way that allows them to find the information they need to write the books and articles we enjoy reading?
Billy Smith, a Professor of History at Montana State University, joins us as part of our “Doing History: How Historians Work” series to lead us on an exploration of how historians organize and access their research.