Public history
Encyclopedia
Public history is a term that describes the broad range of activities undertaken by people with some training in the discipline of history
who are generally working outside of specialized academic settings. Public history practice has quite deep roots in the areas of historic preservation
, archival science
, oral history
, museum curator
ship, and other related fields. The term itself began to be used in the U.S. and Canada in the late 1970s, and the field has become increasingly professionalized since that time. Some of the most common settings for public history are museums, historic homes and historic site
s, parks, battlefields, archives, film and television companies, and all levels of government.
These three elements come across in the 1989 mission statement of the U.S.-based National Council on Public History
: "To promote the utility of history in social through professional practice.". They are also present in a definition drafted by the NCPH board in 2007, stating, "Public history is a movement, methodology, and approach that promotes the collaborative study and practice of history; its practitioners embrace a mission to make their special insights accessible and useful to the public." However, this draft definition prompted some challenges on the H-Public listserv from people in the field, who raised questions about whether public history is solely an endeavor by professional or trained historians. Others have pointed out that the existence of many "publics" for public history complicates the task of definition. For example, historian Peter Novick
has questioned whether much of what is termed public history should actually be called private history (for example, the creation of corporate histories or archives) or popular history (for example, research or exhibits conducted outside the norms of the historical discipline). Cathy Stanton has also identified a more radical element in North American public history but has asked: 'how much room is there for the progressive component in the public history movement?' Hilda Kean and Paul Ashton have also discussed the differences in public history in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S., arguing against 'a rigid demarcation between "historians" and "their publics"'. A 2008 survey of almost 4,000 practitioners predominantly in the U.S. showed that a substantial proportion (almost one quarter of respondents) expressed some reservations about the term and whether it applied to their own work.
In general, those who embrace the term public historian accept that the boundaries of the field are somewhat porous and that its definition remains a work in progress, subject to continual reevaluation of practitioners' relationships with different audiences, goals, and political, economic, or cultural settings.
, public and private archive
s and collections, hereditary and memorial associations, preservation organizations
, historical and heritage projects and offices within government agencies, and depictions of history in popular culture of all kinds (for example, historical fiction
). Ludmilla Jordanova has also observed that 'the state... lies at the heart of public history', linking public history to the rise of the nation state. (English Theologian William Paley declared in 1794 that 'public history' was a 'register of the successes and disappointments... and the quarrels of those who engage in contentions [for] power'.) In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a distinct historical discipline formed within Western universities, and this had the effect of gradually separating scholars who practiced history professionally from amateur or public practitioners. While there continued to be trained historians working in public settings, there was a general retreat from public engagement among professional historians by the middle decades of the twentieth century.
During the 1970s, a number of political, economic, social, and historiographical developments worked to reverse this trend, converging to produce a new field that explicitly identified itself as “public history”. The social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s had sparked an interest in the histories of non-dominant people and groups—for example, women, working-class people, ethnic and racial minorities—rather than the “great men”
who had traditionally been the focus of many historical narratives. In Britain, this emerged through the History Workshop Movement. Many historians embraced social history
as a subject, and some were eager to become involved in public projects as a way of using their scholarship in activist or public-oriented ways. In the U.S., a severe shortage of academic jobs for historians led many to consider careers outside the academy. At the same time, publicly-funded efforts were underway in many Western countries, ranging from national celebrations like the United States Bicentennial
to multiculturalist projects in Australia
and Canada
, paralleled by widespread public interest in genealogy
, the tracing of folk and family “roots”
, and other history-related activities. In the wake of deindustrialization
in many industrial places, governments also supported regeneration or revitalization projects
that increasingly included the use of local history and culture as an attraction or a basis for “re-branding”
a depressed area. Out of necessity, inclination, or both, a growing number of people with graduate training in history found employment in these kinds of non-academic settings. Public policy decisions like the passage of the U.S. National Historic Preservation Act of 1966
and the Canadian government’s addition of “historical researcher” as a civil service category in the 1970s, along with the rise of cultural tourism
and the increasing professionalization of many museums and historical societies, have spurred the growth of the field.
In the U.S., the birth of the public history field can be traced to the University of California, Santa Barbara
, where Robert Kelley, a member of the history faculty, obtained a Rockefeller Foundation
grant in 1976 to create a graduate program to train young historians for public and private sector careers. Kelley drew on his own extensive experience as a consultant and legal witness in water litigation cases in conceiving the idea of “public history” as a field in its own right. Conferences in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1978 and Montecito, California in 1979 helped to catalyze the new field. The launch of a professional journal, The Public Historian
, in 1978, and the founding of the National Council on Public History
in 1979 further served to give public-minded historians in the academy and isolated practitioners outside of it a sense that they shared a set of missions, experiences, and methods.
Public history in Canada has followed a similar trajectory in many ways, including the experience of an academic “jobs crisis” in the 1970s and the importance of government as a source of employment for public historians. In 1983, the University of Waterloo created a Master's program in Public History (now defunct), followed by The University of Western Ontario in 1986, and Carleton University in 2002. Also as in the U.S., Canadian public funding for history and heritage projects has shrunk in the past two decades, with public historians increasingly accountable to funders for the effectiveness of their work. Public history also exists as an identifiable field in Australia and to a lesser extent in Europe and other places. As in the U.S. and Canada, there are many public projects involving historians and the interpretation of history that do not necessarily claim the specific label “public history.” The International Federation for Public History, formed in 2010, seeks to broaden international exchanges about the practice and teaching of public history.
Public history continues to develop and define itself. There are currently many graduate and undergraduate public history programs in the U.S., Canada, and other countries (see list and links below). The field has a natural synergy with digital history
, with its emphasis on access and broad participation in the creation of historical knowledge. In recent years there has been a growing body of public historical scholarship, including works recognized by the annual NCPH Book Award. In several countries, studies have been conducted to explore how people understand and engage with the past, deepening public historians’ sense of how their own work can best connect with their audiences. While high-profile “history wars” have taken place over public exhibits and interpretations of history in many places in recent years (for example, Australia’s
ongoing debate over the history of colonisation and indigenous peoples, the furor over Jack Granatstein
’s 1998 book “Who Killed Canadian History?”, or the 1994 controversy over the National Museum of American History
's planned exhibit on the Enola Gay bomber), public historians tend to welcome these as opportunities to participate in vigorous public discussions over the meanings of the past, debating how people arrive at those meanings.
's Robert Kelley Memorial Award, which “honors distinguished and outstanding achievements by individuals, institutions, non-profit or corporate entities for having made significant inroads in making history relevant to individual lives of ordinary people outside of academia,” reflects the breadth of the field and the mix of scholarly, governmental, and popular projects that characterize it:
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
who are generally working outside of specialized academic settings. Public history practice has quite deep roots in the areas of historic preservation
Historic preservation
Historic preservation is an endeavor that seeks to preserve, conserve and protect buildings, objects, landscapes or other artifacts of historical significance...
, archival science
Archival science
Archival science is the theory and study of storing, cataloguing, and retrieving documents and items. Archival science evolved from mankind's need to classify the world around them...
, oral history
Oral history
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews...
, museum curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
ship, and other related fields. The term itself began to be used in the U.S. and Canada in the late 1970s, and the field has become increasingly professionalized since that time. Some of the most common settings for public history are museums, historic homes and historic site
Historic site
A historic site is an official location where pieces of political, military or social history have been preserved. Historic sites are usually protected by law, and many have recognized with the official national historic site status...
s, parks, battlefields, archives, film and television companies, and all levels of government.
Definition
Because it incorporates a wide range of practices and takes place in many different settings, public history has always proven rather resistant to being precisely defined. Three key elements often emerge from the discourse of those who identify themselves as public historians:- use of the methods of the historical discipline
- an emphasis on the usefulness of historical knowledge in some way that goes beyond purely academic or antiquarianAntiquarianAn antiquarian or antiquary is an aficionado or student of antiquities or things of the past. More specifically, the term is used for those who study history with particular attention to ancient objects of art or science, archaeological and historic sites, or historic archives and manuscripts...
purposes - an emphasis on professional training and practice
These three elements come across in the 1989 mission statement of the U.S.-based National Council on Public History
National Council on Public History
The National Council on Public History is a professional membership association established in 1979 to support a diverse group of people, institutions, agencies, businesses, and academic programs associated with the field of public history. The NCPH publishes a quarterly journal, The Public...
: "To promote the utility of history in social through professional practice.". They are also present in a definition drafted by the NCPH board in 2007, stating, "Public history is a movement, methodology, and approach that promotes the collaborative study and practice of history; its practitioners embrace a mission to make their special insights accessible and useful to the public." However, this draft definition prompted some challenges on the H-Public listserv from people in the field, who raised questions about whether public history is solely an endeavor by professional or trained historians. Others have pointed out that the existence of many "publics" for public history complicates the task of definition. For example, historian Peter Novick
Peter Novick
Peter Novick is an American historian, best known for writing That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession and The Holocaust in American Life...
has questioned whether much of what is termed public history should actually be called private history (for example, the creation of corporate histories or archives) or popular history (for example, research or exhibits conducted outside the norms of the historical discipline). Cathy Stanton has also identified a more radical element in North American public history but has asked: 'how much room is there for the progressive component in the public history movement?' Hilda Kean and Paul Ashton have also discussed the differences in public history in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S., arguing against 'a rigid demarcation between "historians" and "their publics"'. A 2008 survey of almost 4,000 practitioners predominantly in the U.S. showed that a substantial proportion (almost one quarter of respondents) expressed some reservations about the term and whether it applied to their own work.
In general, those who embrace the term public historian accept that the boundaries of the field are somewhat porous and that its definition remains a work in progress, subject to continual reevaluation of practitioners' relationships with different audiences, goals, and political, economic, or cultural settings.
Related fields
As its definition implies, public history is an umbrella term that can refer to a wide variety of professional and academic fields. Some of these include:- Archival scienceArchival scienceArchival science is the theory and study of storing, cataloguing, and retrieving documents and items. Archival science evolved from mankind's need to classify the world around them...
- Cultural Heritage ManagementCultural Heritage ManagementCultural heritage management is the vocation and practice of managing cultural heritage. It is a branch of cultural resources management , although it also draws on the practices of conservation, restoration, museology, archaeology, history and architecture...
- Digital HistoryDigital historyDigital history is the use of digital media and tools for historical practice, presentation, analysis, and research. It is a branch of the Digital Humanities and an outgrowth of Quantitative history, Cliometrics, and History and Computing...
- Heritage InterpretationHeritage interpretationHeritage interpretation is the communication of information about, or the explanation of, the nature, origin, and purpose of historical, natural, or cultural resources, objects, sites and phenomena using personal or non-personal methods....
- Historic PreservationHistoric preservationHistoric preservation is an endeavor that seeks to preserve, conserve and protect buildings, objects, landscapes or other artifacts of historical significance...
- Historical archaeologyHistorical archaeologyHistorical archaeology is a form of archaeology dealing with topics that are already attested in written records. These records can both complement and conflict with the archaeological evidence found at a particular site. Studies tend to focus on literate, historical-period societies as opposed...
- MuseologyMuseologyMuseology is the diachronic study of museums and how they have established and developed in their role as an educational mechanism under social and political pressures.-Overview:...
- Oral HistoryOral historyOral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews...
History
Public history has many antecedents. These include history museums, historical societiesHistorical society
A historical society is an organization that collects, researches, interprets and preserves information or items of historical interest. Generally, a historical society focuses on a specific geographical area, such as a county or town or subject, such as aviation or rail. Many historical...
, public and private archive
Archive
An archive is a collection of historical records, or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of an organization...
s and collections, hereditary and memorial associations, preservation organizations
Historic preservation
Historic preservation is an endeavor that seeks to preserve, conserve and protect buildings, objects, landscapes or other artifacts of historical significance...
, historical and heritage projects and offices within government agencies, and depictions of history in popular culture of all kinds (for example, historical fiction
Historical fiction
Historical fiction tells a story that is set in the past. That setting is usually real and drawn from history, and often contains actual historical persons, but the principal characters tend to be fictional...
). Ludmilla Jordanova has also observed that 'the state... lies at the heart of public history', linking public history to the rise of the nation state. (English Theologian William Paley declared in 1794 that 'public history' was a 'register of the successes and disappointments... and the quarrels of those who engage in contentions [for] power'.) In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a distinct historical discipline formed within Western universities, and this had the effect of gradually separating scholars who practiced history professionally from amateur or public practitioners. While there continued to be trained historians working in public settings, there was a general retreat from public engagement among professional historians by the middle decades of the twentieth century.
During the 1970s, a number of political, economic, social, and historiographical developments worked to reverse this trend, converging to produce a new field that explicitly identified itself as “public history”. The social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s had sparked an interest in the histories of non-dominant people and groups—for example, women, working-class people, ethnic and racial minorities—rather than the “great men”
Great man theory
The Great Man Theory was a popular 19th century idea according to which history can be largely explained by the impact of "great men", or heroes: highly influential individuals who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence, wisdom, or Machiavellianism utilized their power in a way that...
who had traditionally been the focus of many historical narratives. In Britain, this emerged through the History Workshop Movement. Many historians embraced social history
Social history
Social history, often called the new social history, is a branch of History that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments...
as a subject, and some were eager to become involved in public projects as a way of using their scholarship in activist or public-oriented ways. In the U.S., a severe shortage of academic jobs for historians led many to consider careers outside the academy. At the same time, publicly-funded efforts were underway in many Western countries, ranging from national celebrations like the United States Bicentennial
United States Bicentennial
The United States Bicentennial was a series of celebrations and observances during the mid-1970s that paid tribute to the historical events leading up to the creation of the United States as an independent republic...
to multiculturalist projects in Australia
Multiculturalism in Australia
Multiculturalism in Australia has a special cultural status.Many similar policies were put in place, for example the formation of the Special Broadcasting Service...
and Canada
Multiculturalism in Canada
Multiculturalism in Canada was adopted as the official policy of the Canadian government during the prime ministership of Pierre Elliot Trudeau in the 1970s and 1980s. The Canadian government has often been described as the instigator of multiculturalism as an ideology because of its public...
, paralleled by widespread public interest in genealogy
Genealogy
Genealogy is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral traditions, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members...
, the tracing of folk and family “roots”
Roots revival
A roots revival is a trend which includes young performers popularizing the traditional musical styles of their ancestors. Often, roots revivals include an addition of newly-composed songs with socially and politically aware lyrics, as well as a general modernization of the folk sound.After an...
, and other history-related activities. In the wake of deindustrialization
Deindustrialization
Deindustrialization is a process of social and economic change caused by the removal or reduction of industrial capacity or activity in a country or region, especially heavy industry or manufacturing industry. It is an opposite of industrialization.- Multiple interpretations :There are multiple...
in many industrial places, governments also supported regeneration or revitalization projects
Urban renewal
Urban renewal is a program of land redevelopment in areas of moderate to high density urban land use. Renewal has had both successes and failures. Its modern incarnation began in the late 19th century in developed nations and experienced an intense phase in the late 1940s – under the rubric of...
that increasingly included the use of local history and culture as an attraction or a basis for “re-branding”
Place Branding
Place branding is a new umbrella term encompassing nation branding, region branding and city branding. Place branding is the process of image communication to a target market...
a depressed area. Out of necessity, inclination, or both, a growing number of people with graduate training in history found employment in these kinds of non-academic settings. Public policy decisions like the passage of the U.S. National Historic Preservation Act of 1966
National Historic Preservation Act of 1966
The National Historic Preservation Act is legislation intended to preserve historical and archaeological sites in the United States of America...
and the Canadian government’s addition of “historical researcher” as a civil service category in the 1970s, along with the rise of cultural tourism
Cultural tourism
Cultural tourism is the subset of tourism concerned with a country or region's culture, specifically the lifestyle of the people in those geographical areas, the history of those peoples, their art, architecture, religion, and other elements that helped shape their way of life...
and the increasing professionalization of many museums and historical societies, have spurred the growth of the field.
In the U.S., the birth of the public history field can be traced to the University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Barbara
The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...
, where Robert Kelley, a member of the history faculty, obtained a Rockefeller Foundation
Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation is a prominent philanthropic organization and private foundation based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The preeminent institution established by the six-generation Rockefeller family, it was founded by John D. Rockefeller , along with his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr...
grant in 1976 to create a graduate program to train young historians for public and private sector careers. Kelley drew on his own extensive experience as a consultant and legal witness in water litigation cases in conceiving the idea of “public history” as a field in its own right. Conferences in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1978 and Montecito, California in 1979 helped to catalyze the new field. The launch of a professional journal, The Public Historian
The Public Historian
The Public Historian is the official publication of the National Council on Public History. It is a quarterly journal published by University of California Press, in Berkeley, California...
, in 1978, and the founding of the National Council on Public History
National Council on Public History
The National Council on Public History is a professional membership association established in 1979 to support a diverse group of people, institutions, agencies, businesses, and academic programs associated with the field of public history. The NCPH publishes a quarterly journal, The Public...
in 1979 further served to give public-minded historians in the academy and isolated practitioners outside of it a sense that they shared a set of missions, experiences, and methods.
Public history in Canada has followed a similar trajectory in many ways, including the experience of an academic “jobs crisis” in the 1970s and the importance of government as a source of employment for public historians. In 1983, the University of Waterloo created a Master's program in Public History (now defunct), followed by The University of Western Ontario in 1986, and Carleton University in 2002. Also as in the U.S., Canadian public funding for history and heritage projects has shrunk in the past two decades, with public historians increasingly accountable to funders for the effectiveness of their work. Public history also exists as an identifiable field in Australia and to a lesser extent in Europe and other places. As in the U.S. and Canada, there are many public projects involving historians and the interpretation of history that do not necessarily claim the specific label “public history.” The International Federation for Public History, formed in 2010, seeks to broaden international exchanges about the practice and teaching of public history.
Public history continues to develop and define itself. There are currently many graduate and undergraduate public history programs in the U.S., Canada, and other countries (see list and links below). The field has a natural synergy with digital history
Digital history
Digital history is the use of digital media and tools for historical practice, presentation, analysis, and research. It is a branch of the Digital Humanities and an outgrowth of Quantitative history, Cliometrics, and History and Computing...
, with its emphasis on access and broad participation in the creation of historical knowledge. In recent years there has been a growing body of public historical scholarship, including works recognized by the annual NCPH Book Award. In several countries, studies have been conducted to explore how people understand and engage with the past, deepening public historians’ sense of how their own work can best connect with their audiences. While high-profile “history wars” have taken place over public exhibits and interpretations of history in many places in recent years (for example, Australia’s
History wars
The history wars in Australia are an ongoing public debate over the interpretation of the history of the British colonisation of Australia and development of contemporary Australian society...
ongoing debate over the history of colonisation and indigenous peoples, the furor over Jack Granatstein
Jack Granatstein
Jack Lawrence Granatstein, OC, FRSC is a Canadian historian who specializes in political and military history.-Education:Born in Toronto, Ontario, Granatstein received a graduation diploma from Le College militaire royal de Saint-Jean in 1959, his BA from the Royal Military College of Canada in...
’s 1998 book “Who Killed Canadian History?”, or the 1994 controversy over the National Museum of American History
National Museum of American History
The National Museum of American History: Kenneth E. Behring Center collects, preserves and displays the heritage of the United States in the areas of social, political, cultural, scientific and military history. Among the items on display are the original Star-Spangled Banner and Archie Bunker's...
's planned exhibit on the Enola Gay bomber), public historians tend to welcome these as opportunities to participate in vigorous public discussions over the meanings of the past, debating how people arrive at those meanings.
Examples
A list of the recipients of the National Council on Public HistoryNational Council on Public History
The National Council on Public History is a professional membership association established in 1979 to support a diverse group of people, institutions, agencies, businesses, and academic programs associated with the field of public history. The NCPH publishes a quarterly journal, The Public...
's Robert Kelley Memorial Award, which “honors distinguished and outstanding achievements by individuals, institutions, non-profit or corporate entities for having made significant inroads in making history relevant to individual lives of ordinary people outside of academia,” reflects the breadth of the field and the mix of scholarly, governmental, and popular projects that characterize it:
- 2010 - Richard Allan Baker, United States Senate Historical Office
- 2008 - Alan S. Newell, Historical Research Associates, Inc.
- 2006 - Dwight T. Pitcaithley, National Park Service
- 2004 - The Government and Citizens of the Tr’ondek Hwech’inTr’ondëk Hwëch’in First NationThe Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in is a First Nations located in the central Yukon, Canada. Its main population centre is Dawson City, Yukon.Many of today’s Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, or people of the river, are descendants of the Hän-speaking people who have lived along the Yukon River for thousands of years...
, First Native Peoples of the Klondike - 2002 - The University of South Carolina Public History Program
- 2001 - Debra Bernhardt, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University
- 1999 - Otis L.Graham Jr., University of North Carolina, Wilmington
- 1998 - The American Social History Project
- 1997 - Page Putnam Miller, Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History (now the National Coalition for History)
Resources
- H-Public listserv
- National Council on Public History
- Canada's National History Society
- Public History Group, Canadian Historical Association
- Public History Resource Center
- Careers in Public History at American Historical Association
- California Council for the Promotion of History http://www.csus.edu/org/ccph/
University programs
For an extensive listing of undergraduate and graduate programs in public history in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere, visit the National Council on Public History website. Also see:- MA in History with Concentration in Public History, American University, Washington, D.C., United States
- MA in Public History, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
- MA in Public History & Joint PhD in American History/Public History, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States
- MA in Public History, The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, United States
- MA Public History, Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London
- MA Public History, Ruskin College Oxford
- MA in Public History, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdcohes, Texas
- MA in Public History, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
- MA in Public History, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas, United States
- MA & PhD in Public History, University of California, Santa Barbara; also has joint PhD program in Public History with California State University, Sacramento
- MA in Public History, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada
- MA in Public History, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio
- MA in Public History and Cultural Heritage, Trinity College, Dublin
- MA in Historical Studies, Public History Track, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, United States