Lonnie Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and Founding Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of how historians do history for the public.

During our exploration, Lonnie reveals why it’s important for historians to reach multiple audiences with their work and how museums allow them to reach those audiences; The importance of humanizing history; And, how history and the historian’s process helped Lonnie and his colleagues build the National Museum of African American History and Culture and interpret the history within it.

History has a history and genealogy has a history. And the histories of both affect how and why we study the past and how we understand and view it.

Today, we explore why it’s important for us to understand that the practices and processes of history and genealogy have histories by exploring what the history of genealogy reveals about the early American past.

Our guide for this exploration is Karin Wulf, a Professor of History at William & Mary and the Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

History tells us who we are and how we came to be who we are.

Like history, genealogy studies people. It’s a field of study that can tell us who we are in a more exact sense by showing us how our ancestral lines connect from one generation to the next.

In this episode of the “Doing History: How Historians Work” seres, we investigate the world of genealogical research with Joshua Taylor, President of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society and a professional genealogist.