Definition
Because it incorporates a wide range of practices and takes place in many different settings, public history proves resistant to being precisely defined. Several key elements often emerge from the discourse of those who identify themselves as public historians:
- A focus on history for the general public, rather than academics or specialists.
- The use of historical methods.
- An emphasis on professional standards, training, and practice.
- An emphasis on the usefulness of historical knowledge in some way that goes beyond purely academic or antiquarian purposes.
- An aim to deepen and empower the public's connection with and knowledge of the past.
These elements are expressed in the 1989 mission statement of the U.S.-based National Council on Public History: "To promote the utility of history in society through professional practice." [1] 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, [2] who raised questions about whether public history is solely an endeavor by professional or trained historians, or if shared historical authority should be a key element of the field. 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). [3] 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?' [4] 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"'. [5] 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. [6]
In general, those who embrace the term public historian accept that the boundaries of the field are flexible. The juxtapositions between public and academic history cannot be ignored, causing complications in defining who is capable of altering what we define as generally accepted history. John Tosh, a historian who has researched public history, discusses how some of the most productive discussions come from oral history, consisting of people being interviewed about their memory. [7] Its definition remains a work in progress, subject to continual re-evaluation of practitioners' relationships with different audiences, goals, and political, economic, or cultural settings. For example, historian Guy Beiner has criticized the prevalent conception of public history for not adequately taking on board “the countless intimate spheres in which history is retold surreptitiously” and concluded that “the complex relationships between private and public forms of history await to be teased out”. [8]
History
Public history has many antecedents. These include history museums, historical societies, public and private archives 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. [10] (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'.) [11] 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. [12] 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. [13]
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. [14] In the U.S., a severe shortage of academic jobs for historians led many to consider careers outside the academy. [15] 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. [16] 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, [17] 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. [18] 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. [19] In 1983, the University of Waterloo created a Masters 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. [20]
Public history also exists as an identifiable field in Australia [21] and to a lesser extent in Europe [22] [23] and other places. In Latin America, public history finds its highest expression in Brazil, where public history is closely connected with social history and oral history. The Brazilian Public History Network, created in 2012, has been responsible for promoting publications and sponsoring events of national and international scope aimed to foster a creative and cosmopolitan dialogue. [24] 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 (IFPH-FIHP) [25] was formed in 2010 and became an international association with elected Steering Committee in January 2012. [26] IFPH is also a permanent [27] Internal Commission of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS-CISH). The IFPH seeks to broaden international exchanges about the practice and teaching of public history and it is one of the constitutive co-operation partners of the journal Public History Weekly . From 2018 IFPH has published its own journal International Public History edited by Andreas Etges (LMU, Munich) and David Dean (Carleton University, Ottawa).
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 National Council on Public History Book Award. [28] 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. [29] 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 Air and Space Museum'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.
An evolving form of locally collected and publicly presented history, seen in projects like If This House Could Talk and the Humanities Truck are a less critical and validated public presentation of history, yet offer engagement at the grass roots level that may encourage new forms of collecting history about the everyday. [30]
Doctor is an academic title that originates from the Latin word of the same spelling and meaning. The word is originally an agentive noun of the Latin verb docēre 'to teach'. It has been used as an academic title in Europe since the 13th century, when the first doctorates were awarded at the University of Bologna and the University of Paris.
Historiography is the study of the methods used by historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension, the term historiography is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic by using particular sources, techniques of research, and theoretical approaches to the interpretation of documentary sources. Scholars discuss historiography by topic — the historiography of the United Kingdom, of WWII, of the pre-Columbian Americas, of early Islam, and of China — and different approaches to the work and the genres of history, such as political history and social history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the development of academic history produced a great corpus of historiographic literature. The extent to which historians are influenced by their own groups and loyalties — such as to their nation state — remains a debated question.
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. Some historians are recognized by publications or training and experience. "Historian" became a professional occupation in the late nineteenth century as research universities were emerging in Germany and elsewhere.
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about people, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries. Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.
A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and interpretation of how individuals relate to each other and to their environments.
Social history, often called "history from below", is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians. Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, with some arguing that its origins lie over a century earlier.
Occupational therapy (OT) is a healthcare profession that involves the use of assessment and intervention to develop, recover, or maintain the meaningful activities, or occupations, of individuals, groups, or communities. The field of OT consists of health care practitioners trained and educated to improve mental and physical performance. Occupational therapists specialize in teaching, educating, and supporting participation in any activity that occupies an individual's time. It is an independent health profession sometimes categorized as an allied health profession and consists of occupational therapists (OTs) and occupational therapy assistants (OTAs). While OTs and OTAs have different roles, they both work with people who want to improve their mental and or physical health, disabilities, injuries, or impairments.
An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms, values, and general behavior of societies. Linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life, while economic anthropology studies human economic behavior. Biological (physical), forensic and medical anthropology study the biological development of humans, the application of biological anthropology in a legal setting and the study of diseases and their impacts on humans over time, respectively.
School psychology is a field that applies principles from educational psychology, developmental psychology, clinical psychology, community psychology, and behavior analysis to meet the learning and behavioral health needs of children and adolescents. It is an area of applied psychology practiced by a school psychologist. They often collaborate with educators, families, school leaders, community members, and other professionals to create safe and supportive school environments.
Communication studies or communication science is an academic discipline that deals with processes of human communication and behavior, patterns of communication in interpersonal relationships, social interactions and communication in different cultures. Communication is commonly defined as giving, receiving or exchanging ideas, information, signals or messages through appropriate media, enabling individuals or groups to persuade, to seek information, to give information or to express emotions effectively. Communication studies is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge that encompasses a range of topics, from face-to-face conversation at a level of individual agency and interaction to social and cultural communication systems at a macro level.
The American Historical Association (AHA) is the oldest professional association of historians in the United States and the largest such organization in the world. Founded in 1884, AHA works to protect academic freedom, develop professional standards, and support scholarship and innovative teaching. It publishes The American Historical Review four times annually, which features scholarly history-related articles and book reviews.
Gender history is a sub-field of history and gender studies, which looks at the past from the perspective of gender. It is in many ways, an outgrowth of women's history. The discipline considers in what ways historical events and periodization impact women differently from men. For instance, in an influential article in 1977, "Did Women have a Renaissance?", Joan Kelly questioned whether the notion of a Renaissance was relevant to women. Gender historians are also interested in how gender difference has been perceived and configured at different times and places, usually with the assumption that such differences are socially constructed. These social constructions of gender throughout time are also represented as changes in the expected norms of behavior for those labeled male or female. Those who study gender history note these changes in norms and those performing them over time and interpret what those changes say about the larger social/cultural/political climate.
The European University Institute (EUI) is an international postgraduate and post-doctoral research-intensive university and an intergovernmental organisation with juridical personality, established by its founding member states to contribute to cultural and scientific development in the social sciences, in a European perspective. Its main campus is located in the hills above Florence in Fiesole, Italy.
The Public Historian is the official publication of the National Council on Public History and considered the flagship journal of the field of Public History. It is a quarterly academic journal published by University of California Press, with the journal's editorial offices housed in the History Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. First published in 1978, The Public Historian emphasizes original research in Public History and related fields, fresh conceptualizations of the field and its practice, new viewpoints in the ways audiences connect the past to the present. The journal aims to provide a comprehensive look at the field, with each successive issue as a snapshot of the ways in which it is evolving. It provides both practicing professionals and teaching and research academics with the results of research and case studies that address the broad substantive and theoretical issues inherent in the field through a variety of article types, including research articles, essays, reports from the field, and roundtable discussions. The ISSN is 0272–3433.
History is the systematic study and documentation of the human past.
An academic discipline or academic field is a subdivision of knowledge that is taught and researched at the college or university level. Disciplines are defined and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned societies and academic departments or faculties within colleges and universities to which their practitioners belong. Academic disciplines are conventionally divided into the humanities, the scientific disciplines, the formal sciences like mathematics and computer science, the social sciences are sometimes considered a four category.
Digital history is the use of digital media to further historical analysis, presentation, and research. It is a branch of the digital humanities and an extension of quantitative history, cliometrics, and computing. Digital history is commonly digital public history, concerned primarily with engaging online audiences with historical content, or, digital research methods, that further academic research. Digital history outputs include: digital archives, online presentations, data visualizations, interactive maps, timelines, audio files, and virtual worlds to make history more accessible to the user. Recent digital history projects focus on creativity, collaboration, and technical innovation, text mining, corpus linguistics, network analysis, 3D modeling, and big data analysis. By utilizing these resources, the user can rapidly develop new analyses that can link to, extend, and bring to life existing histories.
Indigenous archaeology is a sub-discipline of Western archaeological theory that seeks to engage and empower indigenous people in the preservation of their heritage and to correct perceived inequalities in modern archaeology. It also attempts to incorporate non-material elements of cultures, like oral traditions, into the wider historical narrative. This methodology came out of the global anti-colonial movements of the 1970s and 1980s led by aboriginal and indigenous people in settler-colonial nations, like the United States, Canada, and Australia. Major issues the sub-discipline attempts to address include the repatriation of indigenous remains to their respective peoples, the perceived biases that western archaeology's imperialistic roots have imparted into its modern practices, and the stewardship and preservation of indigenous people's cultures and heritage sites. This has encouraged the development of more collaborative relationships between archaeologists and indigenous people and has increased the involvement of indigenous people in archaeology and its related policies.
The National Council on Public History (NCPH) is an American 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.
Financial History Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal published three times a year by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The European Association for Banking and Financial History (eabh). Established in 1994, the journal covers the historical development of banking, finance, and monetary matters. Articles address a broad range of issues of financial and monetary history, including technical and theoretical approaches, those derived from cultural and social perspectives and the interrelations between politics and finance. It is the only authoritative academic journal dedicated solely to financial history.
