Public History students at Portland State University are actively involved in a variety of community-based projects. Public History PDX seeks to highlight their great work, from blogs, podcasts, and internships at local museums and other institutions, to course-based projects.
One of these projects is “This Week Back Then,” a series of podcasts broadcast during KBOO’s News Hour each Monday in 2017 with student-authored blogs posted Sundays weekly here. Students also have the opportunity to publish their portfolios on the site, showcasing the variety of work they’ve done as part of the Master’s program.
“This Week Back Then” is a podcast and blog series born out of Professor Catherine McNeur’s HST411/511 Public History Lab: Podcasts and History course. Students did research, wrote scripts and blog posts, produced and edited podcasts, and collaborated with classmates to bring history to a broad audience. The class worked with producers at KBOO (90.7) to learn recording and editing skills. The students’ podcasts, posted here, will be broadcast during KBOO’s news hour each Monday starting in January 2017.
Beyond Footnotes is a history-themed podcast on local KPSU, sponsored by Portland State University’s Department of History, and run by history graduate students, Lyndsay Smith, Evan Smiley and Jeffrey Stone. Beyond Footnotes features interviews with the talented faculty and students of PSU, providing a forum for local historians to share their work with each other and the community. Read some of the interviews here and listen on Soundcloud.
The show was co-created and formerly hosted by Ryan Wisnor and Joshua Justice of Dive Audio and originally launched on October 9, 2015.
Lower Columbia River Chinookan Communities Project. Originally a legacy project created in part by The Center for Columbia River History (CCRH), the Lower Columbia River Chinookan Communities Project at chinookstory.org includes short narratives, images, primary documents, video and audio interviews, and recorded public talks. CCRH staff, Dr. Katrine Barber (Portland State University), Dr. Candice Goucher (WSU Vancouver), and Donna Sinclair (CCRH program manager for the Washington State Historical Society) worked with community and academic partners, and members of the Chinook Indian Nation to explore questions of historical interpretation. The collective work represents two day-long programs funded by Oregon Humanities, a day-long teacher workshop at the Cathlapotle Plankhouse, two Portland State University classes, a PSU Chinook oral history project, and the 2010 James B. Castles lecture. The materials here were made possible by a generous grant from The Friends of Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, a non-profit dedicated to promoting educational programs of the Ridgefield NWR, a unit of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.