Denise Meringolo, associate professor of history, has won this year’s National Council on Public History Book Award for her book Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History.

The National Council on Public History is an organization dedicated to making the past useful in the present and to encouraging collaboration between historians and their public.

In Museums, Monuments, and National Parks, Meringolo traces the roots of the public history field, showing that the roots of public history reach back to the nineteenth century, when the federal government entered into the work of collecting and preserving the nation’s natural and cultural resources. Meringolo shows that the emergence of the education-oriented National Park Service history program in the 1920s and 1930s gave public history an institutional home that grounded professional practice simultaneously in the values of the emerging discipline and in government service, but that even thereafter, tensions between administrators in Washington and practitioners on the ground at National Parks, monuments, and museums continued to define and redefine the scope and substance of the field. The process of definition persists to this day, Meringolo argues, as public historians establish a growing presence in major universities throughout the United States and abroad.

In selecting Meringolo’s book for the award, the committee said that “Meringolo turns the historian’s trained eye on the historical profession itself and in so doing has produced an outstanding work on the public practice of the history profession…[,] bring[ing] new insights to the origins and craft of public history. Public historians have always had to tink hard about self-definition and this is often conceived in relation to historians within the academy. Meringolo reminds us that what makes public history so distinctive, and so potentially powerful, is that its origins lie not within either side of the university/non-university dichotomy, but rather within a truly collaborative effort among a variety of public and private institutions to render the idea of ‘nation’ meaningful to American society at large. By examining the origins of public history, Meringolo’s book can reframe and reinvigorate debates about how history can remain in the public sphere, and about the types of partnerships which can be created to sustain history’s relevance.”

PROMISE at UMB (University of Maryland – The Founding Campus, downtown Baltimore), invites you to join them for the 2nd  Biennial Henrietta Lacks Symposium: The Dignity of Difference presented by The University of Maryland. From the website: “The event features Harriet Washington, author of Medical Apartheid, and artist (and TED speaker) Rick Guidotti, founder of Positive Exposure, as well as a panel of distinguished academicians.”

Symposium: March 7, 2013 from 8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (Doors open at 7:30 am)

LOCATION: Southern Management Corporation Campus Center and University of Maryland School of Nursing

621 W. Lombard St. Baltimore, MD 21201

Directions: http://www.umaryland.edu/smccampuscenter/building/index.html

The main speaker for this event wrote the book: “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.” Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman from Baltimore. Her cells were used, without her knowledge, for cloning, gene mapping, and vaccines. Her story was brought to the forefront by Rebecca Skloot in the book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” 

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Journalist Sheryl McCarthy talks with Author and Bioethicist Harriet Washington in this video:

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Author Rebecca Skloot talks about Henrietta Lacks’ cells and science in this video:

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Former PROMISE Peer Mentor, Dr. Jocelyn Reader, postdoctoral fellow at the Greenbaum Cancer Center, will meet us for breakfast at 7:30 AM at UMB prior to the seminar. Our office and representatives from PROMISE at UMB will post any additional information on this thread. Please register for your free ticket, and write a short post below to let us know that you plan to attend.

Our thanks to Dr. Erin Golembewski, Senior Associate Dean of the Graduate School at UMB, organizer of the PROMISE “meet-up” for this event.

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PROMISE teachable moments:

All researchers working with human or animal subjects should have CITI certification and be well versed in responsible conduct of research.  Know the rules, maintain ethics, and be a responsible researcher. Don’t ever be swayed by any lure of fame or fortune that will compromise your integrity.

The text content of this post was compiled and written by the staff of PROMISE: Maryland’s AGEP and may not be copied without referencing the PROMISE organization, as “PROMISE: Maryland’s AGEP”.

PROMISE AGEP Online Information by PROMISE: Maryland’s AGEP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

PROMISE at UMB (University of Maryland – The Founding Campus, downtown Baltimore), invites you to join them for the 2nd  Biennial Henrietta Lacks Symposium: The Dignity of Difference presented by The University of Maryland. From the website: “The event features Harriet Washington, author of Medical Apartheid, and artist (and TED speaker) Rick Guidotti, founder of Positive Exposure, as well as a panel of distinguished academicians.”

Symposium: March 7, 2013 from 8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (Doors open at 7:30 am)

LOCATION: Southern Management Corporation Campus Center and University of Maryland School of Nursing

621 W. Lombard St. Baltimore, MD 21201

Directions: http://www.umaryland.edu/smccampuscenter/building/index.html

The main speaker for this event wrote the book: “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.” Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman from Baltimore. Her cells were used, without her knowledge, for cloning, gene mapping, and vaccines. Her story was brought to the forefront by Rebecca Skloot in the book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” 

———————————

Journalist Sheryl McCarthy talks with Author and Bioethicist Harriet Washington in this video:

———————————

Author Rebecca Skloot talks about Henrietta Lacks’ cells and science in this video:

———————————

Former PROMISE Peer Mentor, Dr. Jocelyn Reader, postdoctoral fellow at the Greenbaum Cancer Center, will meet us for breakfast at 7:30 AM at UMB prior to the seminar. Our office and representatives from PROMISE at UMB will post any additional information on this thread. Please register for your free ticket, and write a short post below to let us know that you plan to attend.

Our thanks to Dr. Erin Golembewski, Senior Associate Dean of the Graduate School at UMB, organizer of the PROMISE “meet-up” for this event.

———————————

PROMISE teachable moments:

All researchers working with human or animal subjects should have CITI certification and be well versed in responsible conduct of research.  Know the rules, maintain ethics, and be a responsible researcher. Don’t ever be swayed by any lure of fame or fortune that will compromise your integrity.

The text content of this post was compiled and written by the staff of PROMISE: Maryland’s AGEP and may not be copied without referencing the PROMISE organization, as “PROMISE: Maryland’s AGEP”.

PROMISE AGEP Online Information by PROMISE: Maryland’s AGEP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Donald F. Norris, professor and chairman of UMBC’s Dept. of Public Policy, has been named an inaugural honoree of the new Urban Affairs Association (UAA) Service Honor Roll. This award recognizes Norris’s contributions to both the association and the field of urban studies. The UAA credits honorees with contributing to the current breadth and richness of the discipline. Norris will be reorganized at an award luncheon for Honor Roll inductees on April 5 at the UAA conference in San Francisco.

Last month, we started hosting lessons on APIs to teach people all over the world how to harness the power of real web apps. Codecademy users have integrated videos into their websites, called/texted friends, shortened URLs, and much more. With Codecademy, we think we can bring the power of programming to everyone. That's why we're working with more companies you likely interact with every day in order to show you how programming can affect your workflow and daily life. Use Twitter? So do tens of millions of other people. Most of those people tweet from the Twitter app. With today's new courses, you can tweet from Codecademy or write your own cool scripts that tweet on certain triggers. That's just the beginning.

With these new API offerings, you'll be able to:

• Control the cloud. With courses from Box and SkyDrive, you'll be able to store and access files from anywhere in the world.
• Authenticate with other apps using OAuth. These days, countless web applications (including Twitter and Facebook) use OAuth to authenticate users. Let GitHub be your guide to the OAuth2 protocol.
• Become a consummate consumer. Find the latest fashions with Gilt, the best restaurants from Ordr.in, and pay for it all with Dwolla.

And much more!

Whether you're looking to learn an API that will underlie your web app or you just want to pull in some data for your site, you'll find a ton of useful, customizable, and fun services in our latest batch of API lessons. Our partners have worked hard to bring you a host of new tools to integrate into your own projects—check them out!

(And if you're interested in teaching your API, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us.)