Dr. Brian Whetstone ’18 knows that history lives well beyond textbooks and traditional classrooms. It exists in the museums we visit, the trails we hike, the documentaries we watch, the events we commemorate and the landmarks we treasure.
As a public history consultant living in Dunstable, Massachusetts, Whetstone preserves and advocates for our collective connections to the past.
“A public historian does historical work beyond the academy,” Whetstone said. “That includes things like working in museums, working for the National Park Service, working for preservation organizations. It encompasses the ways people interact with history that aren’t exclusive to the classroom. When you frame it that way, you realize that we interact with history in many ways every day.”
Whetstone, who graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s doctoral program in history and received a graduate certificate in public history, recently published an article in The Public Historian, the preeminent academic journal in the field of public history. Titled “Renting History: Housing and Labor on Public History’s Front Lines,” the article traces the practice of renting and exchanging labor for housing at museums and historic sites as they evolved over the 20th century.
Whetstone’s idea for the article took root several years earlier during a part-time job in his hometown of Kearney, Nebraska.
“In high school, I was a tour guide at the GW Frank Museum of History and Culture at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. That museum once had staff who lived on the second floor and gave tours of the first floor,” he said.
During graduate school, Whetstone began to “dig in earnest” on the topic when he was involved with a project to expand the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum, a historic house museum in Hadley, Massachusetts, that has three apartments on site.
Now, Whetstone is under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press to expand his research into a book called “Renting History: Housing, Labor, and America’s Heritage Infrastructure.” The expected publication date is 2027.
Honing his skills at Hastings College
From an early age, Whetstone has been intrigued by history.
“Part of my childhood was in an older home in Kearney. I have very visceral memories of that old house. There was something special about it,” he said. “Working at the Frank Museum in high school helped articulate why and how a place could matter to our communities and sense of identity.”
After a new director at the Frank Museum introduced the young scholar to the field of public history, Whetstone discovered Hastings College as an ideal place to pursue his passions.
“When you pair the work of historians with the work of service learning that Hastings was doing, you get public history — thinking about how history can take shape outside the classroom in our communities,” he said.
Whetstone was selected for an Architectural History Field School experience with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the College of William and Mary in Virginia the summer before his junior year. After he returned to campus, the Hastings College Board of Trustees asked him to pursue a historic designation for Weyer Hall. The project expanded when the Nebraska State Historic Preservation Office suggested he seek a designation for a broader portion of campus.
Following months of research, architectural documentation and presentations to the state office, the National Park Service added 12 campus buildings significant in the College’s post-World War II growth to the National Register of Historic Places as a local historic district. A historic marker next to the Daugherty Center recognizes the designation.
Finding early success in his field
At only 29, Whetstone has already distinguished himself as a public historian.
After graduate school, he was one of only eight scholars selected as a Princeton-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for the Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities at Princeton University. He coordinated research and technical documentation projects as a historian for the National Park Service’s History, Architecture, Conservation and Engineering Center. He was a research fellow for the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites.
While intelligence and enthusiasm have driven his success, Whetstone is quick to credit his mentors at Hastings College.
“The history department always asked how we could make history useful and relevant to the wider world beyond a class or a reading. That’s the underlying question in the field of public history. Hastings trained me to think that way, and it has made me a better historian,” he said.
