Richard Rabinowitz
President
Richard Rabinowitz is one of the leading public historians in the United States, with over thirty years of experience in creating new museums, exhibits, media presentations, outdoor installations, and educational programs that connect our people to their communities, their diverse traditions, and American lives past and present.
As founder and president since 1980 of American History Workshop, Dr. Rabinowitz has led the creative work of scholars, curators, educators, artists, architects, designers, and institutional planners in fashioning over 400 successful and innovative history programs at sites like the New-York Historical Society, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the Constitution Works program at Federal Hall in New York; the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute; the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati; twenty-six state heritage park projects; and local and regional historical societies in thirty states.
Certain principles underlay all of Dr. Rabinowitz's work. As a historian working with general audiences, Rabinowitz has connected the freshest scholarly creativity with the areas of greatest significance to the inquiring learner. As a planner, he has strengthened the role of cultural institutions as centers of educational energy in their community, while assuring their growth and stability as professionally managed organizations.
As an educator, Rabinowitz has emphasized programs to bring learners into an active interrelationship with the material of their curricula, whether that was through group "hands-on" encounters, landscape design incorporating interpretive elements, electronically enhanced re-creations of historical moments, or more private encounters with objects of aesthetic and instructive value.
Biographical
A scholar of American social and religious history, Dr. Rabinowitz has taught at Harvard, Skidmore, and Scripps colleges. His book, The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life: The Transformation of Personal Religious Experience in Nineteenth-Century New England (Northeastern University Press, 1989), has been recognized as a "subtle and thoughtful analysis of what it has meant to be religious in America." He has also written historical books and articles for children and for museum professionals.
He began his professional career, from 1969 to 1975, at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, where he led the development of an ambitious and pioneering museum education program. Among his responsibilities were the development of classroom curricular materials using museum resources, training classroom teachers, and collaborating on the design of a new acclaimed museum education center. From 1977 to 1980 he served as a special assistant to the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities on policy and program development.
He has won awards in museum and exhibit planning from the American Association for State and Local History; for film and multi-image work from the New York Association for Multi-Image and the International Film & TV Festival of New York; for educational media from the Houston International Film Festival; for historical scholarship from the American Society of Church History, the Danforth Foundation, and many others; and for historic preservation work from the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society.
Education
A.B., summa cum laude, Harvard College, 1966. Ph. D., History of American Civilization, Harvard University, 1977.
Lynda B. Kaplan
Media Director / Planner
Lynda B. Kaplan is a media producer with extensive experience in documentary film and video production. She has successfully organized corporate communication campaigns, produced fund-raising films, and managed the research and writing process for news and information programming. Her organizational ability, creative vision, and practiced communication skills, enable Ms. Kaplan to get to the heart of an issue quickly and effectively.
As a principal of AHW, Ms. Kaplan has overseen the curatorial work and media production for Slavery in New York at the New-York Historical Society, for the Arizona Historical Society in Tempe, the Constitution Works program at Federal Hall in New York City, and for exhibit design projects at Daniel Chester French’s home and studio in Stockbridge, Mass., Reynolda House in Winston-Salem, NC, and many other sites. As project manager, Ms. Kaplan fashioned an interpretive exhibit for the Parks Council of New York City, People Make Parks, at the Municipal Art Society. She produced permanent exhibits and audio tours for the award-winning Luce Center for the Study of American Culture at the New-York Historical Society. She has done extensive oral history interviewing for AHW projects at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and both video production and archival research for the “War For Freedom” project in collaboration with the Civil War battlefield parks.
She has translated her experience in television journalism into leadership of the state-of-the-art documentary work at the center of Telling Lives, AHW's prototype digital history project for museums and libraries. In this capacity, she is producing sample videos for exhibit use, overseeing software and hardware designers in engineering and programming of the "Going to School" and subsequent thematic modules, and modeling the incorporation of digital video in the research projects, exhibits, public programs, and websites of participating cultural institutions.
Biographical
Ms. Kaplan worked for several years in theatrical management before she began her career in film and video. She was an associate producer for two Emmy award winning programs at WCBS-TV. Ms. Kaplan also worked on ABC's Good Morning America both as a researcher and field producer, where she was responsible for interviewing people and matching the right person with a particular story. Her film work in the corporate world includes projects for The Wall Street Journal, International Paper Company, The Girl Scouts of America, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, among others. Before joining American History Workshop, Ms. Kaplan conducted research for several PBS programs and served as Producer/Director for Adam Smith's Money World.
Ms. Kaplan also organized public television participation in and an independent fund raising drive for a film on women and the United States Constitution funded by the Revson Foundation.
Education
B.A., Speech and Theater, University of Illinois.