The National Council on Public History (NCPH) is a membership association dedicated to making the past useful in the present and to encouraging collaboration between historians and their publics. Our work begins in the belief that historical understanding is of essential value in society.

NCPH establishes professional standards, ethics, and best practices; provides professional development opportunities; recognizes excellence in a diverse range of public history activities; fosters networking and a sense of community among public history practitioners; and supports history education. Our quarterly journal, The Public Historian, is the definitive voice of the public history profession in providing historians with the latest scholarship and applications from the field. The NCPH Annual Meeting each spring brings together several hundred members and non-members for workshops, sessions, tours, special presentations, and other events. Our quarterly newsletter (Public History News) and History@Work blog, as well as this web site, keep members and others interested in public history up-to-date with current developments and issues.

NCPH is involved in numerous cooperative relationships with other organizations and institutions, including the National Coalition for History, Organization of American Historians, American Association for State and Local History, and American Council of Learned Societies.

Our members include museum professionals, historical consultants, historians employed in government, archivists, historical administrators, corporate and business historians, cultural resource managers, curators, film and media producers, oral historians, policy advisers, professors and students with public history interests, teachers, and many others. Increasingly, the council has been working to advance public history on an international scale.

NCPH was incorporated as a tax-exempt (501c3) educational organization in 1980 in Washington, DC, to encourage a broader interest in history and to bring together those people, institutions, agencies, businesses, and academic programs associated with the field of public history. NCPH reincorporated in 1997 in the State of Indiana.

A board of sixteen directors governs the organization, and numerous committees of dedicated members make possible its operations and programs. The work of NCPH is supported primarily by annual dues and other contributions from its members, sponsors, and patrons, as well as income from the NCPH Annual Meeting each spring. Headquartered on the campus of Indiana University Indianapolis (formerly IUPUI), NCPH benefits greatly from the generous support of the IU School of Liberal Arts.

The Pop-Up Project

It was when student intern Angel Abshire (Graphic Communications) began cleaning the plates for DeCaro that the reprint project was born.

They decided to make the Little Blue Books the subject of a proposal for the National Council of Public History Conference, planned for March in Canada. Their proposal was accepted, and not only will they make a presentation, but take along reprints of the books to hand out to attendees, and a small printing press so that they can demonstrate onsite. Conference goers get to experience printing from an original plate, using an original portrait printing cut of E. Haldeman-Julius, and a print cut of his signature.

“This is such an interesting way to make history more understandable and more visible,” DeCaro said. Assistant Professor of Art Olivia Timmons has been collaborating with University Archivist Sara DeCaro and several students to reproduce some of the Little Blue Books once published by E. Haldeman Julius.

Thank you to the Pittsburg State University's Department of Art and Crossland Technology Center's Print Department for allowing us to use your equipment and guidance in printing the books.