Thank you for your interest in the history of Dominican University of California!  The Public History program and the Honors Program is proud to showcase the talents of 12 students from our SPRING 2019 Honors Capstone 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  Despite the diversity in potential career paths, trained public historians share a common purpose, to communicate historical content to the public.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. 

​

       The History Department at Dominican is committed to graduating students with a diverse set of skills and knowledge that prepares them to live in the globalized 21st century.  Our department, with the inclusion of a Public History requirement, now asks students to expand their skillset to include the creation of high quality historical content designed for public consumption as a form of digital humanities praxis.  These projects, like the one you are about to enjoy, are based on in-depth individual research projects that combined the collection of community knowledge with historical expert oversight. 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.  The Public History skillset is paired with an equally rigorous classical historical education at Dominican University, designed in total to best equip our students with a variety of transferable skills, civil leadership, and historical knowledge for their future success.

​

       Special thanks to the Dominican Sisters of San Rafael, especially our deeply committed liaisons, Dr. Patricia Dougherty O.P. and Sister Carla Kovack, Leadership Team for the Dominican Sisters of San Rafael, for partnering with Dominican University in this endeavor.  This project would not be possible without the extensive support of the Dominican University Archivist and Head of Special Collections, Anne Reid. Specifically, her direct support was incredibly valuable and her hands are all over this project.  Other people and organizations, without whom this project would not exist, includes the Division of Public Affairs faculty and staff, Honors Program Chairs, Lynn Sondag and Dr. Gigi Gokcek, and countless other supportive faculty, students, administrators, and staff members here at Dominican .  Additional thanks to Maura Wilson and Thomas Burke, whose scholarship and special lectures on campus helped inform the project. We also recognize that the history of Dominican University of California is only part of the broader history of the place in which it exists.  To this end, the Marin Free County Library and other local historical groups and experts served as resources for certain aspects of this project.  In addition, the Dominican Heritage Lecture Series held on campus provided a natural connection with other local experts.  Special thanks also to several long-serving members of the University’s community who were called upon at one point or another to offer their oral histories.

The content found in this project is designed to serve as an introduction to the rich history found on the campus of Dominican University of California.  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, Dominican University of California History Department