Heather A. Huyck

Heather A. Huyck's forty-year career as a public historian bridges academically based history and place-based history, especially as found in the National Park Service system (she has visited 321 of the 405 national park sites). Trained in history and anthropology to focus on cultural resources, she worked on 81 enacted laws as a historian with the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Parks and Public Lands from 1985 to 1994 and as a Park Ranger/Historian for the National Park Service for twenty years. She taught American studies, American history, and Africana studies at the College of William and Mary from 2002 to 2013. A past president of the National Collaborative for Women's History Sites (NCWHS), Huyck now focuses on researching, preserving, and interpreting women's history; she is currently writing "Interpreting Women's History at Museums and Historic Sites." The former director of the Jamestown 400th Project, she is also the recipient of the American Historical Association's Herbert Feis Award for distinguished contributions in public history; the editor of Women's History: Sites and Resources (2008); and a coeditor, with Peg Strobel, of Revealing Women's History: Best Practices for Historic Sites (2011). In addition to working on various NCWHS projects, she was the project director for the Maggie Walker Community as they processed over 15,000 documents from the indefatigible Mrs. Maggie Lena Walker, an African American community organizer and entrepreneur (1864–1934) best known for founding a bank (1903), a newspaper, and an emporium, and for running an insurance company whose resistance to American apartheid should be much better known.