"Why do people hate history classes?" That is a common question that the author, like countless other history instructors, poses to his students on the first day of class. From a recent survey of the author's "Introduction to Asian American History" course, which the author has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles in some iteration each year since 2016, one student declared there is "too much cold memorization," while another lamented, "it's just dates." Their peers felt that history classes are "too disconnected" or, in other words, do not provide the space for students to "relate [content] to today." Others began to gesture towards the Eurocentricity embedded in many classes: in their words, they present "no diverse perspective[s]" or, conversely, they "only show 1 perspective -- the winner." One summer session, the author decided to take these misconceptions of the discipline of history as intellectually static and politically irrelevant head on. In order to disabuse students of those assumptions, and inspired by the roots of the field of Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies more broadly, the author developed an experimental curriculum that centered students as the producers of knowledge and as public historians. The author had considered a service-learning approach, a longtime staple of Ethnic Studies classes that has gained recent popularity in undergraduate history curricula, as a way for students to develop authentic understanding through practice, but the time-intensive logistics of collaborating with an outside organization would not be tenable for a summer course. Instead, the result was a new type of summative assessment for the author and his students: the campus's inaugural Asian American history "pop-up museum." Over the course of six weeks, students identified, contextualized, and synthesized filial or community artifacts into a two-week-long public exhibition at the campus's central Powell Library, along with a companion digital archive. This article argues that the pop-up museum--and the scaffolds designed to produce it--advanced students' content knowledge, while also deepening their understanding of the field of history and the radical significance of crafting a grassroots, publicly accessible archive.