Museum After Dark: Working America exhibit opening

On Friday, September 9, from 6 to 8 p.m., the Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center (CSRHC) will kick off the opening of Sam Comen’s Working America exhibit with a tour and lecture. From 6 to 7 p.m., Dr. Neal Matherne, CSRHC’s education director will lead visitors on a tour of the exhibit, sharing regional and local stories from the museum’s oral history collection. The tour will be followed by a lecture from 7 to 8 p.m., exploring the themes of labor and immigration in the late nineteenth century, featuring Dr. Justin Prince.

As the nation celebrates Labor Day, the Working America exhibit follows themes intrinsic to American experiences like those of US immigrants and first-generation Americans who work in the small, skilled trades. Comen’s photographs share modern stories of economic independence and struggle, belonging and exclusion, faith and fear, and service to both community and family.

Justin Prince received his PhD from Oklahoma State University in 2014, where he serves as a lecturer. He is the author of The Million Dollar Barrage: American Field Artillery in the Great War (2021), published by OU Press, as well as articles on the U.S. Army in the First World War. In addition, he has designed and worked on numerous naval war games. Among his gaming publication credits are War Plan Orange: Dreadnoughts in the Pacific, 1922-1930; War in the Pacific: Admiral’s Edition, and an upcoming project covering the naval war in the Mediterranean during the Second World War, all published by Matrix Games.