Private History In Public

In small community museums, truck stops, restaurants, bars, barbershops, schools, and churches, people create displays to tell the histories that matter to them. Much of this history is personal: family history, community history, history of a trade, or the history of something considered less than genteel. It is often history based on the historical record, but also based on feelings, beliefs, and memory. It is neglected history. Private History in Public is about those history exhibits that complicate the public/private dichotomy, exhibits that serve to explain communities, families, and individuals to outsiders and tie insiders together through a shared narrative of historical experience. Tammy S. Gordon looks beyond the large professionalized museum exhibits that have dominated scholarship in museum studies and public history and offers a new way of understanding the broad spectrum of exhibition types in the United States.

Private History in Public examines history exhibits in small community museums and non-museum settings like bars, churches, and barbershops and argues that these exhibits promote dialogue on historical topics by engaging visitors with individualized perspectives.

This collection of essays, edited by the distinguished historian of education Richard Aldrich, examines past, present and future relationships between the private and public dimensions of knowledge and education. Following the introduction, it is divided into three sections: * key themes and turning points in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries * examples from the twentieth century of non formal education with particular reference to girls and women, the care and education of pre-school children, sex education and family history * an analysis of the private and public dimensions associated with globalization and international education and of examples drawn from Australia and the USA. This book will become required reading not only in respect of contemporary and historical debates about private and public spheres in education, but also with reference to the wider themes of the creation, diffusion and ownership of knowledge.

Americans today choose from a dizzying array of schools, loosely lumped into categories of "public" and "private." How did these distinctions emerge in the first place, and what do they tell us about the more general relationship in the United States between public authority and private enterprise? In Public vs. Private, Robert N. Gross describes how, more than a century ago, public policies fostered the rise of modern school choice. In the late nineteenth century, American Catholics began constructing rival, urban parochial school systems, an enormous and dramatic undertaking that challenged public school systems' near-monopoly of education. In a nation deeply committed to public education, mass attendance in Catholic schools produced immense conflict. States quickly sought ways to regulate this burgeoning private sector and the competition it produced, even attempting to abolish private education altogether in the 1920s. Ultimately, however, Gross shows how the public policies that resulted produced a stable educational marketplace, where choice flourished. The creation of the educational marketplace that we have inherited today--with systematic alternatives to public schools--was as much a product of public power as of private initiative. Gross also demonstrates that schools have been key sites in the development of the American legal conceptions of "public" and "private". Landmark Supreme Court cases about the state's role in regulating private schools, such as the 1819 Dartmouth v. Woodward decision, helped define and redefine the scope of government power over private enterprise. Judges and public officials gradually blurred the meaning of "public" and "private," contributing to the broader shift in how American governments have used private entities to accomplish public aims. As ever more policies today seek to unleash market forces in education, Americans would do well to learn from the historical relationship between government, markets, and schools.

Gossip is one of the most common, and most condemned, forms of discourse in which we engage - even as it is often absorbing and socially significant, it is also widely denigrated. This volume examines fascinating moments in the history of gossip in America, from witchcraft trials to People magazine, helping us to see the subject with new eyes.

The past is consumed on a grand scale: popularised by television programs, enjoyed by reading groups, walking groups, historical societies and heritage tours, and supported by unprecedented digital access to archival records. Yet our history has also become the subject of heated political contest and debate. In Private Lives, Public History, historian Anna Clark explores how our personal pasts intersect with broader historical questions and debates. Drawing on interviews with Australians from five communities around the country, she uncovers how we think about the past in the context of our local and intimate stories, and the role history plays in our lives.

A sharp distinction is usually drawn between public international law, concerned with the rights and obligations of states with respect to other states and individuals, and private international law, concerned with issues of jurisdiction, applicable law and the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in international private law disputes before national courts. Through the adoption of an international systemic perspective, Dr Alex Mills challenges this distinction by exploring the ways in which norms of public international law shape and are given effect through private international law. Based on an analysis of the history of private international law, its role in US, EU, Australian and Canadian federal constitutional law, and its relationship with international constitutional law, he rejects its conventional characterisation as purely national law. He argues instead that private international law effects an international ordering of regulatory authority in private law, structured by international principles of justice, pluralism and subsidiarity.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1860.