What is the value of digital work in park-centered or place-based interpretation? This article offers an answer to this question by reflecting on the work of the ACE (American Conservation Experience) Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship Program’s digital humanities (DH) team. Thanks to deliberate investment from the ACE Mellon Program, we were able to support broad and boundary-pushing digital work—applying the wider field of DH to specific program goals. This work focused on three main categories: producing engaging digital projects and storytelling, preparing fellows and their partners to create their own digital products, and propelling fellows forward into their next career stages through professional development opportunities. The ability for the DH team to work collaboratively, flexibly, and remotely has enabled us to find creative interpretive solutions for Fellows’ individual projects as well as for telling the story of the program as a whole. In this article, members of the DH team offer examples, resources, and lessons learned that can be applied to programs or organizations at various scales who are interested in creating their own DH projects.

This essay examines how the spatial history of Thomas Edison National Historical Park, New Jersey, reveals long-time tensions between exclusivity and public accessibility. At the center of this study is Glenmont, the Edison family home, located within Llewellyn Park—the nation’s first gated residential community. While Llewellyn Park embodied 19th-century elite ideals of seclusion and pastoral retreat, residents like the Edison family operation relied upon the labor of predominantly female domestic workers and the industrial workforce at Edison’s nearby laboratories. I draw on archival research, cultural landscape studies, and heritage theory to illuminate how class-based insulation at Llewellyn Park both obscured and depended on working-class labor. I argue that these dynamics continue to shape visitor experiences at Thomas Edison National Historical Park: the laboratories remain easily accessible on West Orange’s Main Street, while seeing Glenmont requires a multistep, carefully managed process that deters casual visitation. This geography risks reinforcing cultural divides by privileging narratives of one person’s inventions over those of the working-class labor that actualized those ideas. By situating Glenmont within broader debates on gated communities, universal design, and museum inclusivity, I propose strategies for interpreting the invisible labor that sustained Edison’s household and for re-embedding the estate into its diverse local community. Ultimately, this essay calls for a reimagining of Glenmont not solely as a memorial to Edison’s genius but as a site where histories of work, migration, and community belonging can be made visible and usable for contemporary audiences.

The National Women’s History Landmark Project (NWHLP) was the most influential, concentrated effort to improve women’s history representation across the National Historic Landmarks (NHL) Program. Between 1989 and 1993, representatives of the NHL Program, Organization of American Historians (OAH), and the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History (NCCPH) collaboratively generated 39 landmark nominations. Throughout the collaborative process, dissension emerged as project participants disagreed on how to define the two terms most integral to the NHL nomination process: “significance” and “integrity.” This article examines the root causes of these debates and outlines recommendations for productive academic–federal collaborative partnerships.

In this "Letter from Woodstock," our columnist Rolf Diamant considers the Trump administration's abrupt termination of the National Park Service's participation in the Mellon Humanities Fellowship Program.

A poem in the "Verse in Place" section of Parks Stewardship Forum.

This article looks at the origins of Compared to What, a non-profit arts program that was in operation during the 1970s in Washington, DC. It focuses on the organization’s collaboration with the National Park Service in several DC-area parks, among them the National Mall, Anacostia Park, and Rock Creek Park, and argues that such engagement prepared the founders of the organization to be a major player in the go-go promotion scene of the 1980s, notably in organizing the Go Go Live at the Capital Centre concert.

Across the National Park System, visitors, community partners, descendant communities, and researchers are engaging with stories that seek to explore the full breadth of American history. Since 2018, the Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship Program has helped drive this effort. Thirty-five scholars, representing more than a dozen disciplines, have taken part in the initiative, leading efforts such as those described above. Their work has been both challenging and inspiring. They have questioned long-standing agency narratives and norms, while also affirming—often quite vigorously—the capacity of public humanities to bring people together in dialogue and debate. As the national coordinators of the Mellon Humanities Program, we are honored to be guest editors of this special issue of Parks Stewardship Forum. The featured articles offer insight into the depth and breadth of the Mellon Humanities Program’s achievements over the past seven years.

This article is an interview with Ashley Rogers, executive director of Whitney Plantation. Whitney Plantation is the only plantation museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on the story of slavery. The museum is located on 200 acres of a former sugar, indigo, and rice plantation that operated from 1752–1975. Whitney Plantation is now a non-profit museum that preserves over a dozen historic structures, many of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Whitney Plantation Historic District. I asked Rogers to give an interview for this issue of Parks Stewardship Forum because Whitney Plantation is a multi-phase energy story, with compelling climate and environmental justice themes.

Across the globe, our park systems, which serve as strongholds for intact ecosystems and as some of the last bastions of wilderness, are exhibiting the impacts of a changing climate. This is particularly significant because these emblematic sites serve as vital educational opportunities. While parks are uniquely positioned as prospects for promoting climate advocacy, it is important to recognize that our relationship with climate change and our connection to nature varies dramatically across different groups of people. Consequently, the effectiveness of climate-related educational efforts depends directly on strategic messaging that aligns with these distinctions. By using the Biophilia Hypothesis as a theoretical framework and employing the Biophilic Profile, an educational tool that explores our nuanced connection to nature, valuable patterns can emerge that offer insights into strategies to diversify climate messaging to better align with different people’s unique ways of knowing. This alignment can promote more effective, responsive, and meaningful climate campaigns and environmental education initiatives.

Participation in recreational activities in parks and protected areas can inspire both climate change awareness and advocacy by encouraging healthy engagement with nature. However, programming must align with the various ways we relate to nature to be effective. One strategy of alignment is to employ the Biophilic Profile tool, an education survey adapted from the Kellert-Shorb Biophilic Values Indicator (KSBVI). Emerging from the Biophilia Hypothesis, the KSBVI has been utilized by the authors to screen participants before programs to develop curricula that better cater toward participants’ preferred values. The activity guide we present here has multiple activities that can be facilitated in the field for a range of participants. Through the implementation of the Biophilic Profile tool, the authors have found a heightened awareness of nature-connectedness in participants and have been able to guide deeper conversations surrounding climate consciousness by effectively matching relevant activities that strengthen these relationships with nature.