Book Review: Engaging Museums: Rhetorical Education and Social Justice by Obermark, Lauren E. ObermarkLauren E. (2022). Engaging Museums: Rhetorical Education and Social Justice. Southern Illinois University Press. 196 pp. $40.00. ISBN: 978-0-80933-850-4(paperback), 978-0-80933-851-1(eBook).

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Engaging Museums: Rhetorical Education and Social Justice, by Lauren E. Obermark Engaging Museums: Rhetorical Education and Social Justice by Lauren E. Obermark. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2022. 196 pp.; paperback, $40.00. Rachel Vogt Rachel Vogt The Columbus Museum Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2023) 45 (2): 146–147. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2023.45.2.146 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Rachel Vogt; Review: Engaging Museums: Rhetorical Education and Social Justice, by Lauren E. Obermark. The Public Historian 1 May 2023; 45 (2): 146–147. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2023.45.2.146 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search In Engaging Museums: Rhetorical Education and Social Justice, Lauren E. Obermark seeks to improve public rhetoric education in the United States, as well as argue for its renewed relevance in an increasingly divisive society. Museums, she posits, can offer models and methods to revise and modernize rhetorical education by challenging the very definition of where and how rhetoric is practiced. To explore this assertion, Obermark undertakes three rhetorical case studies at three sites of public history: the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (Cincinnati, OH), the National World War I Museum (Kansas City, MO), and the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum (Oklahoma City, OK). At each site, Obermark asks how museum pedagogy and practice can move rhetorical education forward to a place of greater equity, ultimately arguing that the needed improvement “can come from the centering of social justice” (6). By focusing on these lesser known, albeit national, museums, Obermark... You do not currently have access to this content.

I smell a bad word. —Roman Mailloux, four years old There's only one question: Are we the good guys or the bad guys? —Retired Brigadier General, U. S. Marines, at author's 35th anniversary high sch...

Reviewed by: Abraham and Mary Lincoln by Kenneth J. Winkle, and: Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley by Gregory A. Borchard, and: Lincoln and the Civil War by Michael Burlingame, and: Lincoln and the Constitution by Brian R. Dirck, and: Lincoln and the Election of 1860 by Michael S. Green Matthew Pinsker (bio) Abraham and Mary Lincoln. By Kenneth J. Winkle. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Pp. 160. Cloth, $19.95.) Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley. By Gregory A. Borchard. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Pp. 168. Cloth, $19.95.) Lincoln and the Civil War. By Michael Burlingame. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Pp. 176. Cloth, $19.95.) Lincoln and the Constitution. By Brian R. Dirck. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Pp. 184. Cloth, $19.95.) Lincoln and the Election of 1860. By Michael S. Green. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Pp. 152. Cloth, $19.95.) The Concise Lincoln Library from Southern Illinois University Press is a shrewd idea, well executed and full of surprises even for the serious Lincoln student. The growing collection of short monographs on Abraham Lincoln’s life and times edited by Richard W. Etulain, Sara Vaughn Gabbard, and Sylvia Frank Rodrigue aspires to reach a broad audience but refuses to do so by catering to the lowest common denominator. The editors have instead recruited some of the finest Lincoln scholars to help launch the series and have given them wide berth to craft their narratives with large interpretive questions at stake. This is no easy task, and anybody familiar with Lincoln scholarship will instantly recognize the risk-taking nature of the endeavor when contemplating the editors’ decision to call upon Michael Burlingame to produce a 130-page volume on Lincoln and the Civil War. Burlingame might well be the most significant Lincoln scholar working in the field today, but nobody would ever associate his immense talent with the term “concise.” During his long career, Burlingame has dazzled readers with the depth and breadth of his archival research. He also became something of a legend among fellow scholars when he reportedly returned a large book advance from a commercial publisher in order to transform a planned one-volume biography of Lincoln into the multivolume Abraham Lincoln: A Life, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2008. Yet even that exhaustive 2,000-page-plus study, for which Burlingame won the coveted Lincoln Prize in 2010, left him unfulfilled. He has since turned to the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College to post online his entire unedited manuscript from that project (see http://www.knox.edu/academics/ [End Page 260] distinctive-programs/lincoln-studies-center/burlingame-abraham-lincoln-a-life.html). Now here is the tireless scholar attempting to summarize Lincoln’s wartime presidency with fewer words than he once devoted to endnotes in a single volume of his great work. The result is a far more readable and effective summary of Lincoln as wartime president than the scholar’s prizewinning but dense study. Those who bought Burlingame’s two-volume biography but haven’t quite been able to find a summer vacation (or two) long enough to read it should consult this volume. More important, those who teach the Civil War but struggle to find short monographs that convey the complexity of the challenges that President Lincoln faced should assign it. Burlingame is especially adept at explaining the partisan politics of the second half of the war. His chapter on the reelection campaign of 1864 is about as good as any short reading on the topic currently in print. So far, politics appears to be one of the strengths of the Concise Lincoln Library. Michael S. Green has produced a highly readable study of the 1860 election, which even more self-consciously than Burlingame’s volume appears designed for undergraduate classroom adoption. Green is meticulous about providing context essential for guiding student understanding of a complicated four-way campaign. He also provides sharp portraits of the contest’s memorable cast of characters. But most significantly, Green offers a nuanced depiction of candidate Lincoln, one that manages to emphasize both his “shrewdness and, when necessary, his selfishness” (37). Gregory A. Borchard’s Abraham...

Plog, Stephen 1986a Group Mobility and Locational Strategies: Tests of Some Settlement Hypotheses. In Spatial Organization and Exchange: Archaeological Survey on Northern Black Mesa. Stephen Plog, ed. Pp. 187-223. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1986b Patterns of Demographic Growth and Decline. In Spatial Organization and Exchange: Archaeological Survey on Northern Black Mesa. Stephen Plog, ed. Pp. 224-255. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1986c Understanding Cultural Change in the Northern Southwest. In Spatial Organization and Exchange: Archaeological Survey on Northern Black Mesa. Stephen Plog, ed. Pp. 310-336. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Plog, Stephen, and Shirley Powell 1984 Patterns of Cultural Change: Alternative Interpretations. In Papers on the Archaeology of Black Mesa, Arizona, Vol. 2. Stephen Plog and Shirley Powell, eds. Pp. 209-216. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Powell, Shirley L. 1983 Mobility and Adaptation: The Anasazi of Black Mesa, Arizona. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Powell, Shirley, Peter P. Andrews, Deborah L. Nichols, and F. E. Smiley 1983 Fifteen Years on the Rock: Archae-

Medicine and the Media: Balancing the Public's Right to Know With the Privacy of the Patient

Church History in an Age of Uncertainty: Historiographical Patterns in the United States, 1906–1990. By Henry Warner Bowden. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. xiiii + 279 pp. - Church History in the Age of Science: Historiographical Patterns in the United States, 1876–1918. By Henry Warner Bowden. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, reprinted 1991. 287 pp. $22.50. - Volume 61 Issue 4

Shadowed Cocktails: The Plays of Phillip Barry from Paris Bound to The Philadelphia Story Donald R. Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. Southern Illinois University Press' in the Americas series has always sought to explore the American Theatrical canon. This might lead one to assume that the series would serve to simply re-examine and re-evaluate fixtures of the American theater canon like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Instead, the series and its editor Robert Schanke have sought to expand the very nature of the American theater canon to include groundbreaking works by artists that were marginalized because of politics or deemed unworthy of scholarship due to their connection to popular culture. In Shadowed Cocktails, Donald Anderson and the Theater in America Series argue for the inclusion of Phillip Barry as playwright whose commercial popularity challenged conventional social ideas and explored the nature of social roles in changing American society. Phillip Barry arguably one of the most consistent and commercially popular playwrights and screenwriters of the 1920s and '30s. Barry's plays have been characterized by some scholars as being too light-hearted, too focused on the upper-class, and too dated. These purveying notions have led to 40-year drought of scholarship on such fascinating and popular figure in American theater. Anderson argues that Barry was a compelling artist whose neglect seems to have resulted more from historic accident and laws of cultural inertia than lack of worthy material that would hold up over time (165). Anderson succeeds in getting the reader to reconsider Phillip Barry's impact in American theater. Anderson positions this book as an exploration of the Barry canon, an in-depth analysis of his plays and their context within Barry's life. Anderson greatly succeeds in creating chronological, professional, and commercial narrative of Barry's plays. The author able to explore the characters, plots, and themes in all of Barry's works and connect them to Barry's personal life and the height of Modernity. Barry well-noted for how his characters challenged the nature of absolutism and defied conventional social labels. Anderson writes, It the kind of gray line Barry was drawn to again and again, where the gray area between good and bad sometimes almost invisible and given special importance because of how elusive it is (143). From Barry's early works to his later successes, the reader comes to see Barry as complicated individual whose characters are an artistic expression of changing cultural milieu and influenced by the playwright's own life experience. To fully understand how Barry conveyed meanings through his characters, Anderson must employ indepth textual analysis. Anderson's textual analyses of Barry's work are exceptional. He deftly explores the intricacies of each of Barry's plays and turns the craft of textual analysis into an art. Anderson uses his analyses of Barry's plays to explore the interconnected nature of the playwright's craft. Anderson shows how Barry's early works illuminate growing cynicism shared by artists in the aftermath of WWI. …

Journal Article Thomas M. Pitkin. The Captain Departs: Ulysses S. Grant's Last Campaign.. With a foreword by John Y. Simon. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1973. Pp. xix, 164. $6.95, John A. Carpenter. Ulysses S. Grant. (Twayne's Rulers and Statesmen of the World Series, 14.) New York: Twayne Publishers. 1970. Pp. 217. $4.95 and John Y. Simon, editor. The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Volume 3, October 1, 1861-January 7, 1862. arbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1970. Pp. xxv, 479. $15.00 Get access Pitkin Thomas M.. The Captain Departs: Ulysses S. Grant's Last Campaign. With a foreword by Simon John y.. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1973. Pp. xix, 164. $6.95. Carpenter John A.. Ulysses S. Grant. (Twayne's Rulers and Statesmen of the World Series, 14.) New York: Twayne Publishers. 1970. Pp. 217. $4.95. Simon John Y., editor. The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Volume 3, October 1, 1861–January 7, 1862.Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1970. Pp. xxv, 479. $15.00. William S. Mcfeely William S. Mcfeely Mount Holyoke College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 79, Issue 5, December 1974, Pages 1639–1641, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/79.5.1639 Published: 01 December 1974

Journeys Across the Pampas and Among the Andes. By Francis Bond Head. Edited and with an Introduction by C. Harvey Gardiner. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. Pp. xxi, 174. $7.50.) - New Granada: Twenty Months in the Andes. By Isaac F. Holton. Edited and with an Introduction by C. Harvey Gardiner. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. Pp. xvii, 223. $7.50.) - Volume 24 Issue 2

The Force of Fantasy: Restoring the American Dream. Ernest Bormann. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985, 279 pp. Thought and Character: The Rhetoric of Democratic Education. Frederick J. Antczak. Iowa State University Press, 1985. A Rhetoric of Argument. Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor. New York: Random House, 1982.

Michael J. Bell. The World From Brown's Lounge: An Ethnography of Black Middle Class Play. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. 191 + xii pp. Karen Haltunnen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. 262 + xviii pp. Bernard Mergen. Play and Playthings: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. 281 + xi pp. Richard Gid Powers. G-Men: Hoover's F.B.I, in American Popular Culture. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. 356 + xix pp. Janice A. Radway. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. 274 + x pp. William L. Van Deburg. Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. 283 + xiii pp. David E. Whisnant. All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in a Changing Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.340 + xv pp. Two general trends characterize recent American Studies scholarship in the United States: an awareness of cultural pluralism and a covert political stance. American Studies has become a socially-conscious discipline informed by the values and aims of academicians who were socialized and educated during the culturally-turbulent 1960s. As Gene Wise's cultural history of the American Studies movement explains: 'After the middle of the sixties, it was hard to assume that America was an integrated whole; division and conflict, not consensus, seemed to characterize the culture."1 During the late sixties, when popular culture studies emerged as a branch of American Studies, the United States was troubled by moral and ethical concerns. Among the numerous issues which attracted public attention were middle-class hypocrisy, cultural imperialism, social injustice, the abuse of political power, and materialistic values—issues which are recalled in the studies of popular culture to be reviewed here.2

Journal Article Bruce B. Frye. Liberal Democrats in the Weimar Republic: The History of the German Democratic Party and the German State Party. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1985. Pp. xv, 295. $24.95 Get access Frye Bruce B.. Liberal Democrats in the Weimar Republic: The History of the German Democratic Party and the German State Party. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1985. Pp. xv, 295. $24.95. Modris Eksteins Modris Eksteins Scarborough College University of Toronto Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 91, Issue 4, October 1986, Pages 950–951, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/91.4.950 Published: 01 October 1986

Chicago and the Riddle of Race Amy Absher Rashad Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness: Architecture of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 184 pp. $85, cloth. $25, paper. Christopher Robert Reed, The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1920–1929. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 288 pp. $95, cloth. $32, paper. Christopher Robert Reed, Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900–1919. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014. 390 pp. $52. Lionel Kimble Jr., A New Deal for Bronzeville: Housing, Employment and Civil Rights in Black Chicago, 1935–1955. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 200 pp. $35. Robert E. Weems Jr. and Jason P. Chambers, ed., Building the Black Metropolis: African American Entrepreneurship in Chicago. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. 276 pp. $95, cloth. $30, paper. Joseph Gustaitis, Chicago Transformed: World War I and the Windy City. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 368 pp. $25.89, paper. Mary Lou Finley, ed., The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. 495 pp. $45. Natalie Y. Moore, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation. New York: St. Martin’s, 2016. 272 pp. $28.99, cloth. $17, paper. The recent publications concerning the history of Chicago’s South Side all begin in much the same way. They note that Chicago is a city of neighborhoods; therefore, segregation became the defining historical [End Page 135] experience for the city’s inhabitants. Though segregation is not unique to Chicago, Chicago’s segregation is emblematic of the larger American history with race and urbanization. Why? Because segregation in Chicago has always been about more than housing. It haunts joblessness rates, shortened life spans, violence, policing, education, and gender. Segregation in Chicago did not end with the housing voucher programs or the election of Harold Washington. Likewise, segregation did not end in the nation at large with the integration of public schools or the election of President Obama. Currently, at the center of recent publications on Chicago history, is Christopher Robert Reed who demands we ask better questions. He wants readers and scholars to think carefully about segregation and how we book-end history. In The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis: 1920–1929, Reed begins by challenging Drake and Cayton’s seminal work, Black Metropolis. What if, Reed asks, this foundational text had focused on the 1920s rather than beginning in the 1930s? Questioning the canon and origin myths of Chicago history is essential to Reed’s work. Indeed, in Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900–1919, Reed challenges the work of Allan H. Spear and Rayford W. Logan by suggesting that “voluntary clustering” was the first step toward segregation and that Black Chicago’s history is not the history of urban blight. His approach is purposeful. Reed must dislodge the established segregation narrative so he might free the history from its stultifying focus on resistance movements. Ultimately, Reed wants readers to go beyond understanding history as statistics and conflict so as to move toward appreciating the community’s humanity. Reed intends his recent work to be a synthesis and an introspective reinterpretation of the canonical sources. A comparison of Reed’s style of synthesis with Joseph Gustaitis’s Chicago Transformed: World War I and the Windy City demonstrates just how varied the historical synthesis can be. With Reed there is a focus on argument. With Gustaitis there is a focus on details. Reed is able to remake and deepen our understanding of a well-traveled history. Gustaitis teaches his readers, but doesn’t challenge them to interpret. Furthermore, many new histories of Chicago are either imitating or inspired by the work of Christopher Reed. For instance, Robert E. Weems Jr. and Jason P. Chambers, editors of Building the Black Metropolis: African American Entrepreneurship in Chicago, focus on upending E. Franklin Frazier’s 1957 book Black Bourgeoisie, which refused to acknowledge the impact of slavery, Jim Crow segregation as well as mocked Black business [End Page 136] as a “myth,” and blamed business failure on the owners’ lack of acumen. By doing so...

Journal Article A Study in Dissent: The Warren-Gerry Correspondence, 1776–1792. Edited with introduction and commentary by C. Harvey Gardiner. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1968. Pp. xxxi, 269. $15.00.) and The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts. By John J. Waters, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture. 1968. Pp. xi, 221. $6.95.) Get access A Study in Dissent: The Warren-Gerry Correspondence, 1776–1792. Edited with introduction and commentary by Gardiner C. Harvey. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1968. Pp. xxxi, 269. $15.00.) The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts. By Waters John J.Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture. 1968. Pp. xi, 221. $6.95.) Robert E. Brown Robert E. Brown Michigan State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 74, Issue 5, June 1969, Pages 1703–1704, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/74.5.1703 Published: 01 June 1969

The World of Ruth Draper: A Portrait of an Actress. By Dorothy Warren. Foreword by Helen Hayes. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. pp. 224. 23 illustrations. 19.95 paperback. - Volume 41 Issue 2