Over the last half-century, museums and television have begun to tell very different stories about the American past. Whose stories get told, how visitors and viewers encounter these stories, and what they say about our nation—all that has radically changed. Dr. Richard Rabinowitz, one of the leading public historians in the United States, will describe this dramatic shift, and explore how his own work has drawn deeply and unexpectedly upon his background as a child of Jewish immigrants.

Richard Rabinowitz is President of the American History Workshop. Over the past forty years he has led efforts to fashion over 500 successful and innovative history program’s at sites like the New York Historical Society, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and other sites in 33 states and the District of Columbia. In 2010-11, he drew up the interpretive and curatorial plan for the “Slavery and Freedom” exhibition at the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in Washington, DC in Fall 2016. He is currently a Fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at
Yale University.