LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Thank you for your interest in the Marin County Civic Center and Fairgrounds! Dominican University of California’s Public History program is proud to showcase the talents of 13 honors’ students from our SPRING 2018 HONO 4920 course. Public history itself is a growing field, represented in both academia and a variety of professional careers. Despite the diversity in potential career paths, trained public historians share a common purpose, to communicate historical content to the public. Trained public historians can be found working in museums, heritage sites, public parks, the Hollywood film industry, the media, and at every level of government. Beyond this, Public Historians are also found working as or alongside archaeologists, oral history specialists, genealogical researchers, online content creators, and in a variety of other career trajectories. This section of the Honors’ Capstone course at Dominican is designed around Public History, but it allows students to utilize their discipline-specific toolsets through place-based learning. In the class, we defined our research with a specific location, the Marin County Civic Center and Fairgrounds. The type of research the students explored were entirely up to them.
Living in a globalized 21st century, the ability to apply oneself to research and show adaptability through the developing of new skills is essential to post-college success. This project required students to expand their media content designed for public consumption. These projects, like the one you are about to enjoy, are based on in-depth individual research projects that I individually advised upon. Students were required to network with local historical resources as part of their research, resulting in an overarching effort to showcase the power of collecting and organizing community knowledge. All of the students represented here developed highly marketable skills; including, leadership, teambuilding, web design, audio/video content creation, editing, writing, and design.skillset to include archival research and the creation of high quality
Special thanks to the Marin County Library’s Anne T. Kent California Room, the Marin History Museum, and the Museum of the American Indian for partnering with Dominican University in this endeavor. First on this list are Marin County Employees Carol Acquaviva, Laurie Thompson, and Libby Garrison who directly worked with our students. Carol went particularly out of her way to help students with their research topics. Sister Patricia Corr also provided guidance and access to our students interested in the Dominican sisters. Other people, without whom this project would not exist, includes Mietek Kolipinski, Sierra Najolia, Lexi Schumacher, Gigi Gokcek, Alison Howard, Anne Reid, and Jo Jewell. Our students further explored other community resources, including a variety of local museums, veterans groups, and local experts—truly a list too long for a single page!
The content found in this project is designed to serve as an introduction to the rich history found at the Marin County Civic Center and Fair Grounds. We aim to make our shared history come alive; or, perhaps better phrased by Winston Churchill when he commented before parliament shortly after the fall of France in World War II, “History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, revive its echoes, and kinds with pale gleams the passion of former days.
In Appreciation,
Dr. Jordan Lieser, PhD
Assistant Professor, History
Dominican University of California
