What is Public History?
Have you ever wondered how you know history? From where did your understanding of a certain period or event come? What voices, influences or images most impacted and shaped your view of that era? Was it that television documentary you saw, or that movie you recently watched? How did you come to your understanding of the past? This is the realm of public history.
Debates still rage as to what the term ‘public history’ actually means1 , and, with public history becoming an ever-present force and focus in public consciousness2, it has become an issue that is even more pressing. As J.M. Winter explains, ‘If any field of historical writing is not only thriving, but also certain to expand rapidly over the next decades, it is the field of public history…’3 In recent years, history has been thrust evermore into the public’s focus, with the pandemic, and the constant parallels being drawn between it and the 1918 Spanish Flu; the re-emergence of extremism, and its deep roots in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran; the fight for social and racial justice, and the ever-increasing engagement with, and re-interpretation of, Britain’s slavery, racism and division littered past.
Most of the time, public history holds a different understanding for each practitioner.4 Public history is broad; it covers large swathes of, not only historiography and academia, but also public interaction and interpretation of the past. It deals with history, on the one hand, and expressions of history on the other. It deals with the study and interpretation of the past, on one end, and the presentation and popularisation of history on the other. It has to take into account historical truths, historical facts and historical evidence, while also leaving room for the fact that history is not a black and white, clear cut, closed-ended conversation. Instead, it is an open book, free for interpretation and re-interpretation, revisiting and reevaluating. It is not maths, where certain numbers add to give another number. History exists as an ever-growing, ever-changing, ever-evolving amalgam of stories, facts, evidence, eyewitness testimonies, opinions, ideas, hypotheses and leaps of faith. As Charlotte Bühl-Gramer succinctly wrote, history is an ‘ongoing conversation that yields not final truths, but an endless succession of discoveries and interpretations that change our understanding not only of the past, but ourselves and of the times in which we live’.5 It is in that final setting that public history dwells.
As J.M. Winter notes, ‘Public history is history outside the academy, linking historians to the broad population interested - sometimes passionately interested - in historical inquiry.’6 At its core, whatever definition a historian may hold, public history is taking history from the academics and making it accessible and approachable to the Everyman. Public Historians act almost as priests of history, who take scripture and present it in such a way that the layperson might be able to understand and interact with it. Since its formation at the hands of Herodotus, Thucydides and Livy, history has been the endeavour of the academic: those people willing to give their lives in the service of historical inquiry and study it to a degree that the regular member of the public would never be able, or even inclined, to do. This has brought history dangerously close to being considered a subject for the elite, when it should be a subject for all people.
Upon hearing that Aston University in Birmingham and London South Bank University shut down their history courses, Professor Kate Williams remarked that history should be open for all, ‘Otherwise we might as well go back to the Victorian period when this sort of university education was only for elite men… I’ve heard people say, ‘Well, history is protected at the top Russell Group universities’. But that is a really dangerous route to go down. Are we saying that if people don’t get 3As, they don’t deserve to do history?’7 This is the gap that, at its heart, public history endeavours to bridge.
Public history must incorporate an understanding of this situation: that history is far more collective than one might assume. It is almost always collective8, and, as Winter also notes, ‘Those millions of people outside the academy who care about history are part of our profession whether we admit it or not.’9 In this way, public history serves as the bridge between the heavy, dense, complicated, nuanced and vitally important sphere of academic history, and the public that might want to know where they came from, or, why the world is the way that it is. In some cases, public history can also act as a kind of gateway drug to a more rigorous and academic interest in history. Thus, as Bühl-Gramer explains, ‘Public history can be conceptualised as an engagement in society and as a social participation in cultural communication about history…’10
Public history, therefore, acts and presents itself in different ways to academic history. As Barbara Franco writes, ‘The historiography of public history is not found in journal articles but can be read in outdoor museums, historic districts, collections of artefacts, and festivals.’11 Public history is active; it is tangible, visible, visceral and engaging. Public history is ‘more tangible and less abstract than academic history’.12 Public history is the intersection of the academic and the layperson; like a museum, a documentary, a podcast or a commemorative event. Every year, Britain is presented with a case-study in public history through the commemorative traditions of Remembrance Day. Every November, the British public is run through a crash course of public history, with all its biases, agendas, methodologies, focuses and intentions.
With this, a working definition of ‘public history’ can begin to be made. It is, by necessity, a working definition, as society and culture are always evolving, progressing and changing, and with them, so are the boundaries, methods and focuses of ‘public history’. It is with this in mind that my definition of ‘public history’ is formed. Here it is: Public history is the interaction between history and the public; how history is presented to the public, how history is made accessible to the public, and how the public engage with and interpret history.
Rather fortuitously, this is also fairly similar to the definition created by the American National Council on Public History. They decided that ‘public history’ was best defined 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.’
Even with definitions and parameters put in place to help understand public history, it remains broad, in scope, endeavour and methodology. Public history is all around us, it is constantly present, and it pulls the past into the present, and the present into a deeper understanding of its past.
Bibliography:
1 Franco, Barbara, ‘Public History and Memory: A Museum Perspective’, The Public Historian, Vol. 19, No. 2 (University of California Press: Spring, 1997), p.65.
2 Liddington, Jill, ‘What Is Public History? Publics and Their Pasts, Meanings and Practices’, Oral History, Vol. 30, No. 1, Women's Narratives of Resistance (Oral History Society: Spring, 2002), p.83.
3 Winter, J.M., ‘Public History and Historical Scholarship’, History Workshop Journal, No. 42, (Oxford University Press: Autumn, 1996) p.169.
4 Franco, p.65.
5 Bühl-Gramer, Charlotte, ‘The Future of Public History – What Shall We Teach Prospectively? Remarks and Considerations’, Public History and School, ed. Marko Demantowsky, (De Gruyter, 2018), p.202.
6 Winter, p.169.
7 Professor Kate Williams quoted in: Fazackerley, Anna, ‘Studying history should not be only for the elite, say academics’, The Guardian, Saturday, 1st May 2021.
8 Winter, p.169.
9 Winter, p.170.
10 Bühl-Gramer, p.202.
11 Franco, p.66.
12 ibid.
13 Weible, Robert, ‘Defining Public History, is it Possible? Is it Necessary?’, Perspectives on History, March 1st, 2008.
