The National Park Service and Civic Engagement

Linenthal, Edward

FROM 2002 THROUGH 2005 I HAD THE HONOR OF SERVING AS A VISITING SCHOLAR for the Civic Engagement program of the National Park Service. Speaking at the National Collaborative of Women’s History Sites’ annual meeting, former NPS Northeast Region Director Marie Rust characterized civic engagement as “a focusing of current efforts at partnering with communities, expanding our education agenda, telling the ‘untold stories,’ and working with communities and partners to preserve sites that represent the fullness of the American experience.” This vision of civic engagement connects with the public in a number of different ways: it asks employees of NPS to be more inclusive of public voices in their planning, to take more seriously their role in using historic sites—what some have called “America’s greatest university without walls”—for civic education, and to balance the voice of “heritage, “by definition a voice that venerates and shapes progressive narratives of national experience, with the voice of “history,” which integrates into these same national narratives more problematic aspects of our national stories, ones that offer opportunity for somber reflection and an antidote against coarse triumphalism and preening ethnocentrism.