An Article of Interest
Over the years as the field has evolved there have been numerous
definitions of public history. Recently the NCPH Board of Directors
described public history as 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.
Public history also can be described as the conceptualization and
practice of historical activities with ones audience foremost in
mind. Public history generally takes place in settings beyond the
traditional classroom. Its practitioners often see themselves as
mediators on the one hand between the academic practice of history
and non-academics and on the other between the various interests in
society that seek to create historical understanding. Public history
practitioners include museum professionals, government and business
historians, historical consultants, archivists, teachers, cultural
resource managers, curators, film and media producers, policy
advisors, oral historians, professors and students with public
history interests, and many others.
Following the April 2007 NCPH conference in Santa Fe, a lively
discussion developed on the H-Public listserv about the NCPH boards
proposed definition of the field. An annotated summary of some
points from this discussion follows below. (The full archive of
postings can be found via the H-Public website (click on Discussion Logs and choose May, June, and July
2007).
The discussion began with a posting from Kathy Corbett and Dick
Miller that challenged some features of the boards proposed
definition and offered a somewhat different vision of the field. The
boards draft definition is:
"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."
Corbett and Miller questioned whether public history really is a
movement, methodology, or even an approach. Movement seemed to
them to be apt for the element of social activism that helped to
launch public history in the 1970s, but they wondered if the term
was still applicable for a field that has become entrenched in
graduate programs and professional organizations. They argued that
public history neither has nor needs a distinctive methodology, and
that approach was too broad to be meaningful.
More importantly, they were troubled by the implication that public
historians had a mission to bring a special set of insights to the
lay public. They proposed an alternative definition that emphasized
public history as a joint endeavor in which historians and their
various publics collaborated in trying to make the past useful to
the public. This change in emphasis, they noted, would acknowledge
the agency and creativity of all participants in history-making
projects, not just the self-identified public historians.
Listserv members were divided in their opinions about whether public
history does constitute a distinct set of methods or approaches.
Some, like Bureau of Land Management Regional Historian Carl Barna,
argued that, Public History is not a movement, nor a methodology,
nor an approach. Doing History in service to the public is simply
doing History, no more and no less, and doing it no differently than
doing History in the academy Historians who work in the public area
need to be, first and foremost, Historians. Paul Sandul, a
graduate student at the University of California/Santa Barbara and
California State University/Sacramento, agreed: [P]ublic history is
not a distinct methodology Indeed, it seems as if we are framing
some of this discussion on the notion public history is a separate
discipline from academic history instead of just another
concentration in much the same manner as, say, economic history,
social history, or cultural history.
Mary Rizzo, director of education at the New Jersey State House, saw
the field as inherently interdisciplinary, like American Studies.
She argued that rigorous interdisciplinary historical training with
an intent to show students how to make scholarly research accessible
to the public is necessary. It should also include a strong critical
component that will give students the tools to analyze what is being
done in the name of public history. Taking it a step further,
Denise Meringolo, coordinator of the public history track in the MA
program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County wrote,
Whilepublic historians MUST be trained first and foremost as
historiansto conduct research, to craft an interpretation, to write
wellI would argue that this training alone does not prepare someone
for work in the public sector [P]ublic history" is closely related
but distinct from traditional forms of historical professionalism.
Participants also explored the question of the various others and
publics in relation to whom public historians attempt to define
themselves. One obvious other, of course, is academic history, or
the academy in general, and several list members spoke about that
relationship. J.D. Bowers, history professor at Northern Illinois
University, wrote that he envisioned himself as the historian in
the middle between the academic historians and the general
population, while independent scholar Jane Becker noted that she
finds herself thinking of public history as part of the broad range
of humanities scholarship and practice, which can span disciplinary
and popular/academic divides. Pointing to another of public
historys others, Jay Price from Wichita State University stated,
I think the real challenge of definition is not how public history
fits against the academic world (we've done that pretty well), but
rather, how it fits related to popular historysomething that
itself encompasses a wide range of people with radically different
goals and needs. Benjamin Filene from the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro saw this public/popular history relationship
as a reflection of the belief that history is not just the realm of
the experts but of all of us. Moreover, I feel that the
practitioners of these diverse sorts of history-making for varied
publics benefit from talking with each other and reflecting on each
others practices.
In terms of what role public historians can and should play in
relation to popular history-making such as reenactment, genealogy,
community celebrations, and so on, some subscribers spoke about
helping to push the boundaries of how people were approaching their
own history. Mary Rizzo felt it was absolutely essential that
public historians try to push people in their understandings of
their communities and their history, including thinking about
issues of power and causation, while Denise Meringolo said, As a
public historian, I've begun to think of myself as something akin to
a community organizer. While I have training and interests and
curiosities that have led me to become a historian, I became a
public historian when I began actively to look for ways to be of
service, to listen and learn about the precise needs of a given
community, and to gently challenge a community to push its own sense
of boundaries and exclusiveness. As H-Publics editor, I weighed in
with the notion that another key role public historians seem to play
in public projects is to continually broaden narrowly-defined
agendas, with an eye toward keeping space open for possible other
perspectives, including those that might arise in the future.
Although the discussion began with the aim of rethinking the NCPH
boards draft definition of public history, one idea that repeatedly
emerged from the H-Public discussion was the importance of keeping
that definition as open as possible. Ray Smock, a lifelong public
historian and current director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for
Legislative Studies, wrote, You would think that someone who has
been a public historian for 40 years would have solved some of these
definitional questions, but I haven't, although I keep trying.
Others saw the definitional dilemma as part and parcel of the
enterprise of doing public history. Debbie Ann Doyle, public history
coordinator at the American Historical Association, wrote, Perhaps
we should think of public history like gendera category of
identity, complicated, negotiated, and socially constructed in
tension with and in opposition to other categories [Public
historical work] requires public historians to engage in a
conversation about the nature, meaning, and uses of history of
interest to all historians. Benjamin Filene concurred: In a field
like ours, the act of definition should be about opening doors, not
building walls Part of the vitality of public history is that any
definition we come up with will continue to be fluid.
Although the discussion never returned to the concrete task of
offering alternative drafts that the NCPH board might consider, Jay
Price approached this when he proposed that, Perhaps at its heart,
public history is more of a spirit that sees historical
scholarship as part of a larger sense that includes both
professionals of both academic and non-academic stripes as well as
the various segments of the public at large. If I had to sum up the
vision of public history that emerged from this online conversation,
it might be that the participants saw themselves as historians in
the middleoperating between various constituencies and
disciplinary fields, grounded in the methods of the historical
discipline, highly attentive to the social processes and political
implications of their work, and resistant to too much closure when
it comes to defining what they do!
Cathy Stanton is currently the editor of the H-Public listserv, as
well as teaching cultural anthropology at Tufts University in Boston
and history and cultural studies online at Vermont College of Union
Institute & University. Her book, The Lowell Experiment: Public
History in a Postindustrial City (University of Massachusetts Press,
2006) won the 2007 NCPH Book Award. |
