The Public History Initiative
University of California, Los Angeles
Our Mission: History Matters
The Public History Initiative is part of the UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Department of History. Our Mission is threefold:
We train students to communicate and apply history beyond the academy, through hands-on internships, research-focused courses, and collaboration with community partners.
We produce cutting-edge public history. Our work focuses on evidence-based and community-informed research and outreach.
We contribute to history education. We collaborate with K-12 educators to get the most recent history research into school classrooms.
Community Partnership
We collaborate with community partners. We have partnerships with cultural institutions, community organizations, and advocacy groups throughout the Los Angeles region. These partnerships are integral to our work in training students and in producing cutting edge public histories.
HistoryCorps
Our HistoryCorps program places undergraduate history students in credit-earning internships in museums, schools, cultural institutions and community organizations in the Los Angeles region. Our internships focus on preparing our students and future historians to conduct research and engage the community with a hands-on approach to practicing active evidence-based and community-informed historiographical work.
Current Courses
We encourage our students to be active agents in the creation and dissemination of public history. The Public History Initiative offers internships and an “Introduction to Public History” course (Hist 148), which train undergraduate students in public history theory and practice. The history department also offers a variety of courses with public history content, from “Migrant Publics and Political Power” to “Collecting Community History.”
For a list of current and past courses, visit here.
NCHS
The National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS), founded and directed by Professor Gary Nash, made a major contribution to K-12 history education in the United States. Founded in the 1990s, the Center brought together educators and historians. Together, they developed national history standards and created hundreds of lesson plans. We are currently in the process of archiving and writing the history of the NCHS. PHI continues to collaborate with and support educators, and NCHS publications remain available.
Click here to visit our bookstore.
Research
We carry out collaborative, cutting edge research. Current projects include:
“History in the Streets,” which explores histories of street names as forms of commemoration, alongside statues and other commemorative objects.
“Staging Heritage: Policy Lessons from Global Cultural Events for the 2028 LA Olympics” examines how history and culture are packaged and presented during mega sporting events, with an eye towards identifying best practices for LA28.