Documenting COVID-19

With closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many public history organizations are facing a tidal wave of change in how they engage audiences and community members now and how they will do so in the future. At the same time, and more than ever in recent memory, we read in the mainstream press and across social media platforms of people's keen awareness of the “historic” moment in which we are living. Global uprisings in response to racialized, state-sanctioned violence and white supremacy in the aftermath of the Memorial Day 2020 police murder of George Floyd have further crystallized the necessity of historical reckoning. This is, in other words, a moment ripe for consideration of how public historians and memory workers can ethically document our current social, public health, and economic crises, and help dismantle structural inequalities through these efforts.