2009 OAH Community
College Workshops

Juli Jones

Workshop participants reflect on their experiences at the Ybor City Museum and Tampa Bay History Center around the breakfast table at Hillsborough Community College, Ybor City. The post-Museum Day discussions are usually the most animated as historians react to their public history experience.

Sessions in the third year of the OAH Community College Workshop series were held in May at Hillsborough Community College, Ybor City Campus in Tampa, Florida, and in June at Community College of Rhode Island, Warwick. Despite the challenges of the economy, enthusiastic groups of historians met to discuss the core sessions on teaching the U.S. history survey, additional state of the field sessions, and public history site visits. Evaluations were again overwhelmingly positive confirming that the workshops continue to achieve the goal of meeting the professional development needs of faculty teaching the survey course. More time for networking also resulted in further development of regional and national networks of community college historians.

This year Merck & Co., Inc. funded lectures on the history of business (Louis Galambos, Tampa) and the history of science (Daniel J. Kevles, Warwick). Our Museum Day visits to local history sites sparked lively discussion on the uses of public history, particularly in Florida where we visited two very different types of institutions. Our first stop was at the small local history museum run by the state park service. This site focused on Ybor City’s cigar industry and immigrant cultures. From here we went to the brand new Tampa Bay History Center, a regional museum that just opened on Tampa’s waterfront. Prior to our tour, the group lunched at The Columbia Café, the historic Cuban restaurant with a new location at the museum.

Susan Haber of Cuyamaca College leads a session at the Community College of Rhode Island, Warwick, on Designing and Evaluating Online Survey Courses.

In Rhode Island, our site visits included the Slater Mill with guided tours by docents, followed by tours of the John Brown house museum operated by the Rhode Island Historical Society. Dr. C. Morgan Grefe, director of the Newell D. Goff Center for Education and Public Programs, gave a presentation on the challenges of using public sites in teaching American history, and how historians and non-historians interpret artifacts and dominant narratives. In the late afternoon, most of the group went on to a special Newport evening tour, visiting the Breakers mansion built in 1895 by Cornelius Vanderbilt II, and enjoying dinner at the Atlantic Beach Club restaurant. The combination of different nineteenth-century historic site presentations made for an enthusiastic, thoughtful discussion on using public history in teaching about immigration, class, and other aspects of American history.

As in previous workshops, two-year college historians were very interested in discussing best practices in online courses, recent history, internationalizing the survey course, and developing connections with colleagues who share their experiences and concerns. They were also informed of new opportunities for future networking and involvement through the new community college listserv, the community college workshop to be held at the OAH Annual Meeting, and service opportunities. Many participants expressed interest in serving on committees and joining or renewing their OAH memberships. We look forward to an excellent new group of two-year historians becoming active in the near future and hope to meet more new colleagues at our 2010 summer workshops. The 2010 workshops are tentatively scheduled for May and June in Philadelphia and San Francisco. For more information, please contact Amy Stark at the Organization of American Historians.

Juli A. Jones is on the history department faculty at San Diego Mesa College.