CHAPTER 1
What Is Public History?
1
Introducing Public
History
dialogic history
free-choice learning
shared authority
setting problems
problem solving
historical method
audience
collaboration
stakeholders
eflective practice
contextualized learning
anking and problem-posing models of
education
Public history is so diverse that even practitioners struggle to define it succinctly. In 1978,
historian Robert Kelley, who founded one of the early graduate programs in public history,
wrote, “Public history refers to the employment of historians and the historical method
T TT T“HEN YOU THINK ABOUT learning history, do you imagine sitting in a class-
•\ / V / room and reading a textbook? The book you now hold introduces a different
V V approach to history that focuses on engagement. Introduction to Public History:
Interpreting the Past> Engaging Audiences addresses history that people encounter outside
the classroom and beyond the traditional history text. Its chapters guide you, the student,
through an initial encounter with the field of public history, introducing you to underlying
issues, theories, and core principles that ground the field. This book focuses on the big ques
tions that underpin the how and, most importantly, the why of public history.
!
standards, what distinguishes them from
public history:
1. Audience. The audience is public, not academic. Public historians think differently
about audience than they would when sharing their research in academic circles.
The general public does not think about their own pasts or their relationship with
the past the same way historians think about history. Understanding the audience
means understanding what different publics expect and value when it comes to
engaging in historical exploration. This textbook will introduce you to several
different theoretical perspectives that help us work more effectively and ethically
with public audiences.
2. Collaboration. Public historians practice two types of collaboration. First, they col
laborate with the public. Public historians need to think beyond how they will best
serve the public’s needs as audiences or consumers of history, and to think carefully
about how they will work with stakeholders—those who have a specific interest
or a stake in the topics we study, the communities about which we write, or the
institutions or places where we work. Stakeholders might include the people whose
story a public history project will tell, board members at a public history institution,
outside of academia.”1 If we agree that academia is a term used to describe institutions of
higher learning like colleges and universities, then what is “outside of academia”? You can
find public history at a museum, in a historic house, on a walking tour of a historic dis
trict, or on YouTube. Public historians can produce documentaries, historical markers, and
smartphone apps. The field is
oad enough to include more ephemeral venues as well: a
community event, a theatrical performance, a folk-art demonstration. There are more forms
of public history than we can name here, and new ones appear all the time, which is one of
the things that makes the field vi
ant and exciting.
But the question of venue—“inside the academy” vs. “everywhere else”—does not cap
ture all of the differences between public history and traditional academic history. Before
we look at those differences, however, we must recognize what all historians share with
one another. This is what Kelley called, in his definition, the “historical method.” All forms
of history begin in the same place: with solid historical research based on a rigorous ex
amination of available sources. All historians, regardless of where they work or who makes
up their audience, rely on the systematic and critical examination of sources within their
historical contexts to reveal stories of the past, to explain change and continuity over time,
to consider contingency, and to reconcile competing versions of past events as preserved
in a variety of historical sources. Through this process, we assign meaning to the past,
taking a wide range of materials and using them to form a coherent argument about the
meaning and significance of past events. These practices make up the historical method.
Historians place their work within the context of what we already know and make efforts
to contribute to that knowledge by using sources that have not been used before, by asking
new questions of familiar sources, or by using sources in novel ways. The centrality of the
historical method to public history is the reason you will find “Thinking Historically” as
the next chapter in this textbook.
If public history and academic history share similar research methods and interpretive
standards, what distinguishes them from one another? Some key concepts stand out fo
2 A CHAPTER 1
Audience
funders, or politicians. Stakeholders are also potential members of the audience, but
we distinguish them because of the specific relationships they have with the history
eing interpreted. Collaboration with the stakeholders whose history is being told is
one of the defining features of public history work. The second form of essential col
laboration requires work with professionals in other disciplines. Since public history
involves skills that go beyond those of a historian, public historians collaborate with
scholars and experts in other fields. Academic historians often work alone to produce
a monograph; public historians work in teams to produce projects.
3. Reflective Practice. Public historians intentionally incorporate what they learn from
the successes and failures of their professional experiences into future interpretive
and engagement strategies. All historians have ethical responsibilities. We must
epresent primary sources fairly and accurately and acknowledge when we draw on
the work of other scholars in our own work. Public historians have added ethical
esponsibilities that require many layers of reflective practice that will be discussed
throughout the book.
Who Is the Public? What Is Their Relationship with "History"
and "The Past"?
If one of the major defining characteristics of public history is a public audience, then who
is this “public” and what is their relationship with history, or what some prefer to call “the
past”? In 1994 and 1995, a group of historians conducted extensive phone interviews with
1,453 Americans in an attempt to explore how they understand their pasts and interact with
history. In The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (1998), historians
Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen interpreted the interviews and argued that Americans
actively engaged with the past as they sought to understand the forces that had shaped the
individual people that they were in the present and that would affect the people they wanted
to become in the future. The survey respondents also expressed strong preferences for how
they got information about the past. They trusted museums the most, with personal accounts
from relatives following closely in second place, and firsthand accounts from someone who
had been present at an event in third place. College professors, high school teachers, and
nonfiction books still held some credence, but participants ranked movies and television
programs as the least trustworthy (table 1.1). Americans also told the researchers they wanted
to be able to assess what they learned from any source against their own previous knowledge
and draw conclusions for themselves. Before Rosenzweig and Thelen, historians had not
spent much energy analyzing their audience. While museum studies scholars and practi
tioners were already thinking deeply about audience reactions to exhibitions and museum
visits, Rosenzweig and Thelen looked at people’s relationship with the past in the totality of
their lives. Their study remains our best source of information about the attitudes different
populations have about their own relationship with history and the past, something that is
not captured in visitor surveys about specific exhibitions.
INTRODUCING PUBLIC HISTORY ▲ 3
I
XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX (289)
XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX (290)
College history professors XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX.0 (261)
High school history teachers XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX2 (293)
Nonfiction books XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX6 (278)
XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX2 (291)
Table 1.2.
59% 61%
38%8% 4% 26% 10%
7%4% 3% 7%4%
The past of the United States 22% 5%24% 11% 22%
, - -v.-W1
69%
h ....... ■ "■ ■ i
Tables 1.1 and 1.2 are from Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in
American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) and are reproduced (with edited captions) with permis
sion of the publisher from http:
chnm.gmu.edu/survey/tables.html.
Movies or television programs
about the past
Conversations with someone
who was there
The past of your racial or
ethnic group
The past of the community
in which you now live
Personal accounts from your
grandparents or other relatives
100%
N=191
100%
N=176
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100%
N=796
100%
N=616
100%
N=297
s
_____... ii------------------------*4
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Table 1.1. Trustworthiness of Sources of Information about the Past—By Racial/Ethnic Group
....... ... .........
Museums XXXXXXXXXX)
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The past of your family
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1 „ 11 J
50%
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Respondents were asked about seven "places where people might get information about the past."They rated the
trustworthiness of each "as a source of information about the past using a 1 to 10 scale," with 1 meaning "not at all
trustworthy'and 10 meaning "very trustworthy." This table reports the mean score the national sample and four
acial/ethnic groups gave the sources of information in the far-left column.The number in parentheses indicate the
number of respondents on which each mean is based.
Respondents were asked the following question: "Knowing about the past of which of the following four areas or
groups is most important to you—the past of your family, the past of your racial or ethnic group, the past of the
community in which you now live, or the past of the United States?"This table reports the percentage of respon
dents in the national sample and four racial/ethnic groups that chose each of the pasts in the far left column.
Most Important Pasts—By Racial/Ethnic Group
- ------- -
.........
£ !
--------------- ■■— ....—il ,i
66%
http:
chnm.gmu.edu/survey/tables.html
INTRODUCING PUBLIC HISTORY 5
Who Does the Public Trust?
Rosenzweig and Thelen found that the public trusts the history they learn about in museums more
than any other source, for two very different reasons. First, people in the study concluded “museums
a
ived at their interpretations only after experts pooled their independent research.”4 In other words,
historians and professionals in other fields had worked with one another to develop interpretations;
one interpretation had not been able to control the museums agenda. Second, museum exhibits allow
members of the public to interact directly with “real” objects from the past, devoid of interpretative
Diversity of Public Experiences
“The public” includes many different people with very different personal experiences. Diversity may
come in the form of age, educational background, economic standing and class, religious diversity,
different abilities, diversities of language, as well as cultural, racial, and ethnic diversities. Sometimes
we can understand diversity of experience in terms of privilege or marginalization. For example,
nondisabled people experience privilege every day whether they recognize it or not. A person with a
disability might never see someone like themselves depicted in a public history venue. In fact, disabil
ity-rights advocates had to wage protests to add a statue of President Franklin D. Roosevelt sitting in
a wheelchair to the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, although his paralysis during his presidency
is now widely known. The Presence of the Past revealed that Americans who had historically been
marginalized, specifically African Americans, American Indians, Mexican Americans, and LGBTQ_
(Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) individuals, often understood themselves to be part of a
specific “collective past.” African Americans, for example, used their understanding of the black past
to distance themselves from an “official” version of the past organized around a dominant na
ative
that erased the experiences of their families and communities (table XXXXXXXXXXPotential stakeholders and
consumers of public history projects will approach the work through the lens of their own experiences;
public history practitioners need to understand that phenomenon.
Because different segments of the public will approach history differently based on their own his
torically situated experiences, understanding your audiences is complex. You must look deeper when
examining which publics you serve as a public historian in order to consider multiple layers of expe
ience. For example, understanding basic demographic details of your audience may be a good start,
ut there are variations beyond typical profiles, such as age, economic levels, gender, race, ability, and
ethnicity