I was raised on peanut butter and elderberry jelly sandwiches. My amazing paternal grandmother, Mary (Kler) Heisinger (who I called “Momma”), made the jelly every year from wild berries at our family home in the Catskill Mountains that my family affectionately calls..

I am very happy to share the news that I am chairing a session at the upcoming National Council on Public History (NCPH)/American Association of State and Local History (AASLH) joint conference in Providence, RI, this September! The roundtable session is titled "The..

My paper for the AAIHS meeting had to contribute to an exciting atmosphere of deep intellectual thought amongst people who are also enthusiastic about demonstrating the importance of the past to the present. The theme of the entire conference was “Preserving Histories..

This year I was honored to have a paper accepted by the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) for their annual meeting, held in Pittsburgh on March 27-28, 2026. Some of you may remember that I attended the conference as a spectator last year to learn as..

I had the privilege of attending the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) annual meeting, which was held in Providence, Rhode Island, this year. At the last academic conference I attended, I was still a newly minted PhD discussing my academic research...

Surnames of formerly enslaved people can add a lot of confusion when trying to piece together families. Many enslaved individuals were denied an official surname prior to..

I have agonized over what I would say in a blog post that would speak to the gravity of where our nation is today. I..

If you are anything like me, you have spent the last couple weeks at home with little faces staring at you for attention while you try to get work done. Quarantine has proved particularly challenging for parents of school-age and younger children as we added..

A popular image exists of Native Peoples meeting the passengers of the Mayflower as a first contact scenario where the indigenous populations in what would become New England saw..

While I was in graduate school, I wrote my dissertation on tribal museums and the ways they share authority with the communities that they serve. I focused my research on the St. Regis..