Become a leader and engage wider audiences in historical reflection!

In December of 2018, Patty Limerick was awarded an $800,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for an Applied History training program tying historical understanding to real-world solutions for modern problems.

Through a series of courses, projects, networking events and summer programs, graduate students, postdoctoral students and faculty will combine their historical knowledge with practical skills. Under the guidance of mentors, participants will craft responses to recurring issues in the West, including wildfires, natural resource management, gender, culture, race and the challenges and opportunities facing native peoples.

We offer individual and group workshops that train a new generation of Environmental Historians and Historians of the American West to become experts in the field of Applied History. Our Applied History Toolkit profiles the following skills that you will have fun acquiring:

Identify Your Audiences

Figure out the sectors of society who need to be guided by your historical research; they may not know it yet, but they’re about to find out.

Reach—and Hold—Your Audiences

Reconfigure, realign, and “repurpose” your academic skills to ensure that you will never lose your audience, and they will never want to lose you.

Connect from the Very Start

Cultivate customs for beginning with the essential question (“How can I help?”), and then move fast to enlist your audience in helping you to help them.

Choose Your Stance

Reflect—with intensity—on whether you want to be an activist or a moderator, or some hybrid thereof. Applied Historians are free to champion a cause, but they should sketch out the cost/benefit implications of every posture available to them.

Embrace the “All Hands on Deck” Approach

Never lose sight of the fact that historians affiliated with universities, colleges, museums, historical societies, governmental agencies, non-profits, etc., etc., are all each other’s professional kinfolk, and stay constantly on the alert for opportunities to work in partnership.

Prepare to Tolerate—and Even Prevail Over—Bad Temper and Outrage

Practice techniques of self-management to stay calm when historical subjects set off strong feelings. Recognize that holding steady and coping with these episodes of agitation will make you a stronger historian (and provide you with memorable stories to tell when disarming the next assemblage of the crabby).

Anticipate—and Counteract—Performances and Declarations of Apathy and Indifference

Recognize that a sector of the population will always need to tell you that history was their least favorite subject in high school, and recognize that it is still your mission to invite those folks to value historical perspectives and awaken to their relevance. Patience, persistence, and bursts of creativity will set them—and you—free of the legacy of boredom.