Making the Public History Classroom Public

My Public Humanities Fellowship involved me designing a new graduate-level elective at Queens College, “Public History”, that was co-listed between the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies and the History department as part of our MLS/MA Dual Degree program. The philosophy behind the course design, which involved fieldwork and collaboration with the Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground Conservancy, was to use LIS principles and archival theory (such as appraisal, archival intervention, and digital preservation) to structure our collaboration and more traditional historical research. The OTFBG served as a burial site for African-American and Native American communities in Queens for the latter half of the 19th century.

​The results of the course and our collaboration with the OTFBG Conservancy have been substantial. In October 2018, Mayor de Blasio and other NYC politicians announced the allocation $1.63 million dollars towards the construction of a memorial which will include names of known individuals buried at the site that our research helped to uncover. Queens Museum opened an exhibition in spring 2019, Monuments to an Effigy, that took up the Burial Ground as its subject and drew directly on the resources that we had created in 2016.

We’ve published our work as part of the Queens Memory platform.

Johnathan Thayer’s interdisciplinary background includes a BA in English, a Master’s in Library Science with a concentration in Archival Studies, and a PhD in History. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at Queens College, CUNY, where he is Coordinator/Advisor for Archival Studies, Coordinator of the MLS/MA Dual Degree in LIS and History, and Internship Coordinator. His past positions include Labor Studies Fellow at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and Public Humanities Fellow at Humanities New York. He is also Senior Archivist at the Seamen’s Church Institute.