Welcome to the blog for History 592, the summer seminar for teachers and public historians. This is an intensive one week class that the History and Philosophy Department at Shippensburg University offers each June. Dr. David Godshalk and I are teaching the course this summer, and our focus is on material culture and historical narrative. Our class be visiting a number of sites relevant to Pennsylvania history, and we'll also be traveling to Washington, DC at the end of the week to see sites relevant to national narratives of historical progress. We're going to do our best to think critically about those narratives, both locally and nationally.

For those of you who'd like to read along, we've assigned Carolyn Kitch's book Pennsylvania and Public Memory, an excellent, critical exploration (both geographically and intellectually) of industrial heritage sites in Pennsylvania. We take Kitch's critical eye as a starting point for our adventure!

Our first site visits were on Monday, June 19 to a future industrial heritage site in our own back yard, an abandoned freight car just adjacent to the Cumberland Valley Rail Trail just off campus. We also visited a new bicycle truss bridge, one modeled upon older railroad bridges in Pennsylvania and around the world. On Tuesday, June 20, we visited an abandoned AME Church in Mt. Holly Springs and we walked to the Lincoln Cemetery, an African American cemetery in Carlisle that borough officials agreed to bulldoze in the early 1970's to make way for a park. Tomorrow, I'll post student reactions to these visits, but here are some photographs from the past couple of days.