Casey Gamble is the Museum Programs Coordinator at Vulcan Park and Museum in Birmingham, Alabama.

How would you describe your job, do you consider yourself a “public historian?” 

My official title is “Museum Programs Manager” and right now that pretty much means doing all the history, education, and collections related things at my small history museum. And yes, I would say that makes me a “public historian” using the definition by NCPH. 

What was your general career path?  

It’s been a kind of long and windy road: I earned a B.S. in history with the intention of going straight to grad school and eventually earning a PhD. But, life changes plans sometimes, and I needed to find a job right out of college and wound up working in accounting for over 5 years before finishing up a master’s in secondary education with a focus on social studies. I taught in a classroom for a brief time, but quickly realized that environment was not for me, and I sought out alternatives. It just so happens that the museum where I had done a year long internship while in grad school was hiring a part time education coordinator, and I was able to transition to a full time position after that. 

What was your favorite project that you have worked on?

For the centennial of the passage of the 19th amendment we created a women’s suffrage exhibit for our small temporary gallery. I was able to help with the research, writing, and editing of that exhibit and I had so much fun working on it! At the opening reception, some of the women featured were able to attend, and although some of them had passed away, their families came and it was awesome to get to meet everyone and hear personal stories. 

What advice do you have for someone looking for their first public history job?

Get as much varied experience as you can. Us historians like to specialize, and that’s great, but not always practical. Try to get internships, volunteer work, or part time jobs (if feasible) in collections, research, education, and even front line positions like visitor services. Try to do as much as you can while still in school so that you have a solid resume when you graduate. I know it’s not fun, and believe me, I know it’s hard, and can seem almost impossible. But even if you can devote a few days a month to volunteering, that helps! Look into writing articles or blog posts for museums, present at a conference, attend training sessions. It all helps! Right now, there are virtual volunteer opportunities, too. Don’t wait!

I interviewed Keith S. Hébert, Ph.D.Associate Professor of History, Public History Program Officer, Auburn University

What got you interested in History and the field that you study?

​I grew up in a county filled with historic buildings and sites associated with the American Civil War. Raised by a single mother, we did not have a great deal of money for travel, but we spent a lot of time on the weekends and holidays visiting regional state and national parks. I visited Chickamauga National Military Park many times as well as New Echota State Park and the Etowah Indian Mounds. When I was 8, my mother purchased a set of encyclopedias. I read those books daily. Although I am a historian, I am interested in a wide array of topics and encyclopedias exposed me to a broad base of knowledge. In the seventh grade, my teacher Ms. Hale showed us a film Nicholas and Alexandria–a drama that examined the rise and fall of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. From that moment on, I was hooked on Russian history. When I enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of West Georgia, I started out as a pre-medicine major but quickly changed to history because the university offered a broad range of Russian history courses. My senior year, I broke my leg trying to impress my French girlfriend. Due to my surgeries I had to drop a class and finish up my degree the following semester. The sole course available that summer was a Public History Internship which I completed at the Atlanta History Center. From that moment on, I knew that wanted to be a public historian because I enjoy sharing what I know with audiences both in and outside of the classroom.

Were you ever discouraged about your work?

​Studying history was not something that my family understood. I come from a working class family. Just going to college was seen as a necessary step toward a career, but history was not the career path those closest to me envisioned. Overcoming their doubts and constant reminders that I could always become a nurse or lawyer rather than a historian was and remains hard. Most folks do not run into too many historians who make a good living and love what they do. I could not imagine doing anything else.

Have you traveled for your history work?

​I have traveled across the United States for my work. Writing my first book on Bartow County, Georgia, I traveled to California for several weeks to research some archival papers related to my subject held in San Francisco. As someone who grew up in the rural South, being a temporary resident of San Francisco was one of the most enjoyable times in my life. Growing up without a lot of money and little opportunity for travel, my career as a historian has taken me to many places that I would have never had access to. For example, several years ago I got to interview President Jimmy Carter in his apartment in Atlanta. Years ago, I was part of an exhibit committee at the Atlanta History Center that included actor Sean Connery. A few years back, I was working on a project to preserve a historic monastery. The monks allowed me to live among them for a few days and to visit and photograph their most private places within their sanctuary. They had taken a vow of silence. The fact that I was able to stay silent for three days was quite a miracle. A few years ago, I got to hand out with historian Eric Foner, my favorite historian. I picked him up from the airport and hung out with him for three days!

Do you think that there is more to learn in your field?

​Despite what other historians might think, there is still much to be discovered about the history of the American Civil War and Public History. Anyone who thinks the Civil War has been exhausted does not know what they are talking about. Anyone who think neither the Civil War nor Public History scholarship is not as rigorous and exceptional as work in their field is also delusion and deeply prejudiced. The Civil War offers scholars a chance to investigate in depth the intersections of race and class and regionalism in American history.

How do you think that history in today’s world is seen and do you agree with how it’s being treated?

​I think most people are quite ignorant about the study of history. What passes for history on television and movies is abysmal and has fed our increasing ignorant society. We need history more than ever but unfortunately like everything else history, based on sound research and methods, has fallen victim to our nation’s poisonous political climate. When we live in a society that cannot come to an agreement that slavery was foundational to our nation’s past and as such continues to play some role in our contemporary race relations and society, I mourn for the small place that academic historians hold in American public discourse. None of this is surprising when we live in a society devoid of facts and distrustful of experts in all fields whether it be public health or climate change. History is no different.

What do you think should happen to monuments and statues that are taken down?

​My thoughts on this topic have evolved quite a bit because of my interactions with Neo-Confederates over the years. In the past, I pleaded with Neo-Confederates to do a better job of contextualizing their monuments to tell a more complete version of history than the one they tended to present–the Confederacy had little to do with slavery and that it was a superior society defeated at the hands of an inferior society because of the latter’s greater resources and numbers–ie The Lost Cause. Neo-Confederates had generations to clean up their pitiful act but failed to do so. Now, there is great momentum to bring down monuments. I now find myself in support of those who wish to topple these relics of the past that offer nothing noteworthy about the Civil War but only reflect the lies told by generations of white southerners as part of the Lost Cause mythology–the lies that I was taught as a student growing up but later discovered were falsehoods. I would not mind seeing those monuments dumped into the Alabama River or Mobile Bay at this point. Their supporters had generations of time to clean up their act and to improve their interpretation of what scholars have been telling them for years. If they go into museums they need to include an accurate story of why they were erected in the first place and why their removal was seen as necessary by many in society.

Dr. Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Historian Johnson Space Center: Houston, Texas

1. What drew you to history and why did you choose to enter it as a professional field? 

Originally, I was a Political Science major.  At the start of my senior year in college, I enrolled in the first half of the American women’s history survey and really enjoyed it.  Afterwards I declared a double major in Political Science and History.  At the end of my senior year, I decided to pursue a master’s degree to study women’s history. 

After competing my master’s degree I began working as hall director at a community college and taught a couple of classes here and there.  About nine months later, I began applying for several open positions at nearby community colleges.  One college encouraged me to reapply the next year.  I decided a doctorate would help me stand out, so I decided to apply to doctoral programs. 

2. Did you set out with the intent working in the public history?

Not initially but I did see it as a backup and applied to several programs that offered public history courses.  At the time, only a handful of schools offered PhDs in public history, and Washington State University was one. 

3. Were there any big opportunities or experiences that shaped your interests or your career?

There were many.  A couple standout at this moment.  I wrote my master’s thesis on the impact and influence of New Mexico clubwomen on their local communities.  To fill a gap in limited resources I conducted ten oral history interviews with women from the different clubs across the state and used sections throughout my manuscript.  This sparked my interest in oral history. 

As a PhD student, I participated in two internships including one with the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.  Interning with the project opened the door to a full-time position in 2002.  On my first day in that position, I traveled to San Diego and sat in on an interview with Sally Ride, America’s first woman in space.  What a memorable day!   

4. How did graduate school prepare you for the professional field? What sorts of skills have proved useful and were there any areas of your training that were lacking?

Graduate school gave me solid training in research and research methods like oral history.  Working on my master’s thesis I learned how important interpersonal relationship skills were to gathering information locked away in people’s homes and clubhouses.  Conducting oral history interviews as a grad student prepared me for my current position.  Researching the Montana National Guard helped me think outside of the box when it came to looking for materials unavailable in the organizational records. 

Graduate school—even our public history program—focused solely on academics.  Rarely did I collaborate with others on projects, yet I work as a part of a team every day.  Nor did I receive the management skills one needs in public history.  Historians need to be trained in project management, budget, and personnel matters.    And, public historians need to be prepared to work on tasks that in no way relate to research or writing.  These can be arranging meetings, travel, or coming up with a budget for a project.  Public historians also need training in how to handle difficult situations and people. 

5. Each day is different, but what are some of the tasks you handle daily?

It is difficult to characterize my days as they vary so much, but I do handle reference requests on a daily basis.  Lately, because I am teleworking, I have had regular online weekly meetings with my management.  On typical days before this pandemic, I might be arranging travel, preparing to conduct an oral history interview, or editing an oral history transcript.  I might be at the archive doing some research or doing an interview with the media or a student.  Occasionally I give tours of the Center and am a guide.  Other days I might be gathering research for a talk or giving a talk.  Really, I never know what my day could bring.  For instance, I might also be completing required IT security, ergonomic, record management, or safety training.

6. What advice do you have for someone who may be close to getting out of graduate school or looking for their first job 

In the public history world you need to market all your skills—not just your ability to research and write. 

Years ago I attended a cultural resource management conference where the owner of a firm spoke to students.  She explained that she did not need someone who could only do one thing, in this case CRM.  She needed someone who could service her trucks and do CRM or CRM and the accounting.  Even in the federal world I have seen this.  The Department of Energy recently hired a historian but wanted the new hire to be their cultural resources manager, their archivist, and their historian. 

After finishing your master’s or doctorate don’t assume you’re finished with your education.  The world is changing, jobs are much less secure, and you should continue to look for ways to market yourself.  I have earned a certificate in historic preservation and am pursuing a master’s in Information Science to make sure I’m more flexible in my current position, but also marketable if I need to change jobs. 

Ty Malugani – Education Coordinator for Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark, tyler.malugani@birminghamal.gov

1) What led you to the job you have now?

I have always been interested in history and I came to Birmingham to get my degree at UAB. I had never really been here before, so I started visiting sites around the city including Sloss and I just fell in love with the place. During my, I think my Junior year, I did an internship at Sloss and started giving tours and getting to know the site. I then volunteered, and then did another internship during the master’s program, and then volunteered again. When the job opened up, I just sort of jumped at it.

2) Did you always want to do public history over academic history?

That’s a good question. No, I didn’t know at all. It was one of those things, where I grew up going to museums and I loved it. Throughout school, I wanted to be a high school history teacher because I thought of all the terrible history teachers I had. Then I got to UAB and through teaching as a TA and just being there I thought maybe being a college professor, but after experiencing public history I saw that I could teach kids, but not all the time. I could teach and be involved in other things. Public history could give me bits of everything I liked. So, not until my master’s did I sort of buy into this idea of public history.

3) What is your favorite project you’ve done at any site you’ve worked at?

As weird as it sounds, and I know it’s weird, but probably cataloging all of the Birmingham postcards at the Vulcan. That is where I found that I liked working with artifacts and touching the history. Also at Oak Hill I got to develop the accession system and worked on accessing the books, which hadn’t been done there yet. For Sloss, I currently am working on developing virtual tours and stuff like that and it’s really, really fun. But, the Vulcan project is one of my favorites when I think about it. I found I lived developing systems and being hands on and organizing stuff even if it’s a lot of just sitting on a computer and entering data. It can be pretty fulfilling. I thought of the night tours at Sloss, too, but those can get pretty corny, so yeah, I think just the cataloging.

4) What are the pros and cons of your job?

As far as the pros go, to me, like I said, I really like being able to teach, but not all the time. I get to work on other things. I get to have my hands in all kinds of things, teaching kids, developing programs, continuing research, handling artifacts. To me, working in a museum is basically like being able to do what I think is the full scope of history, which is all of those things. There is also the constant challenge of having to figure out how to best portray information to the public, but this is also a con. The public has to understand on their own, without me there to explain to them, what I am trying to get across. And of course, that Sloss isn’t just a haunted place. It’s a museum with real history. Also when I come up with programs, there has to be funding and especially now that’s even more difficult with a tight budget. I have to figure out how to make programs cost effective. Oh, and with teaching you get breaks, with museums, especially when I am working on a new project, I get calls constantly, so It becomes pretty time consuming.

5) What advice would you give to someone who wants to get into public history?

Volunteer, intern, volunteer, intern, volunteer. You have to get your foot in the door. It’s somewhat unfortunate, but museums require so much experience to get a job, so you have to get to these places and make yourself known. In Birmingham, I wanted a job so I spent time at all the sites volunteering. You also need to network, when you put that application in for a job, you want them to already know who you are. You have to put yourself out there. This is what worked for me.

Since I had administered this Presence of the Past survey to my roommate, I thought it would be an interesting idea to make some comments about it. in the survey, there were quite a few questions which are on the spot by asking my roommate to think about the past, both in his family roots and in his leisure time what he had done and what he had missed. Then pick out a favorite moment and savor it. Questions like this one can not only immerse us in our memories but also teach us the moral of remembering who we are and where we are from. As habits in a person’s life could often influence their perception of the world and lifestyle.        However, something else did caught my attention as there are some imperfections to this survey. There are specific questions asked about African Americans and Hispanic Americans, but the Asians seemed to be the one left out. Another issue worth mentioning is that in the end of the survey some questions are just too sensitive to certain people. Such as asking how much their family made within a year. What I would have done is add questions for Asians while asking about basic information about those candidates. Such as name, school, favorite movie etc. That’s all I can conclude about the survey.

Zongru Han

One of the biggest problems in the survey is most of the questions were out dated. Most of people do not read a book about past for personal pleasure. My roommate, who is a cs student, has no interest to read any books about any kind history. And for almost one year, the only “historical” movie he watched was the “1917” film I rented. It is easy to understand, what history or past can help him to develop a computer program. However, because of Twitter and TikTok, and the BLM movement now is taking all the headlight, he told me he did learn a lot of African American history in the past few months via all the short videos he watched on the social media. So from my experience, add a question like “where did you learn your history lessons” could be up to date. And I can guarantee many of the answers would be “youtube,” “Instagram,” “tiktok,” or any kind social media we may know or not know. And I will not surprise that very soon there will be people telling me “Soviet caused the WWII.” (From the recent Call of Duty trailer, I feel that can be happened very soon.)

I feel that these questions were on point. They were well thought out and pertinent to the survey that was being done. I did think that more could be asked about their family life, children, grandchildren, etc.

Also, interestingly, there were few questions about DNA and testing. The results of these could be detrimental to someone learning that their whole life was not what it seemed. Learning that your parent (father) wasn’t your birth father could be very emotionally damaging to someone. I have lived this scenario and it wasn’t pretty. My mother and father were both deceased when I learned this fact, so I couldn’t ask the questions that I needed answers to. I did have my siblings, but they weren’t talking and were not comfortable telling me that they had known for years but didn’t want to hurt my feelings by telling me the truth.

Asking questions that have hard answers, not only about public history, but about someone’s personal history should be done to record people’s feelings and thoughts about a certain time and place. Having these records brings a more real feeling to the reader and could possibly change the outlook of the person doing the reading or history.

The process was familiar to me, I did a similar survey about a year with my old roommate.  I asked similar questions about his background, and it was also history related.  But it was more about the list of things that he watched or heard regarding history. For example, what museum you last visited, last history documentary he watched. The process was the same, the survey went smooth for both individuals, they were both similar to my age I think that helped a lot. The first survey was simpler than this one, the questions asked was more direct, it did not need explanation. This survey requires the person to elaborate on some questions, some of the questions require you to not only give an answer but explain your reason why you gave it.  The only problem I ran into with survey was the person I interview, he did not been to recently been to museums or read any book regarding to history. Overall, I would not change the survey, I felt it was a good way to see what we are learning as far as history, not only our preferences.

This was my second time doing this survey, the first time I believe I interviewed my Dad and remember having to explain a lot of the questions to help him understand the meanings of some of the questions. This time I interviewed one of my coworkers at the Home Depot, someone a bit closer to me in age. The interview went about as smooth as the first time and I think the main issue is the wording with a few of the questions. The shorter questions are easy to read and answer, but the lengthier questions required a bit of explanation. I had a similar issue last time. I also feel to make results easier to collect, the questions could be put into a Google Survey to help limit answers on yes or no questions and provide options on questions that seem too open ended (i.e. the part 2 of Q1, on Section I). My father was a bit quicker on this question because he liked older movies and they served to remind him of the times when he was younger watching them, but my coworker had a bit of trouble answering this question because he has seen a lot of movies set in the past and he said all movies are about the same to him. That part of the question could be reworded away from using “like”; the word “interest” would be a better here . Also I feel that COVID-19 has affected a few of the questions in a way that may skew results if it’s not stated that these result were taken during a pandemic.