Public history

Public history describes the work of people with historical training who apply their skills outside of university classrooms. It draws heavily on fields like historic preservation, archival science, oral history, and museum curatorship. Since the late 1970s, the practice has grown more professionalized, especially in the United States and Canada. Common workplaces include museums, historic homes and sites, parks, battlefields, archives, film and television companies, new media, and government agencies at every level.

Defining public history is tricky because it covers so many activities and settings. Still, those who identify as public historians tend to share a few core ideas: they focus on history for the general public rather than for academics; they use historical methods; they emphasize professional standards and training; they aim to make historical knowledge useful beyond purely academic or antiquarian goals; and they seek to deepen the public’s connection to the past. These ideas appear in the 1989 mission statement of the National Council on Public History, which promotes “the utility of history in society through professional practice.” A 2007 draft definition from the NCPH board called public history “a movement, methodology, and approach that promotes the collaborative study and practice of history” and stressed making insights “accessible and useful to the public.” That draft sparked debate on the H-Public listserv, with some questioning whether only trained historians can do public history and whether shared authority with the public should be central. Others noted that the existence of many different “publics” makes definition harder. Historian Peter Novick wondered if some work called public history—like corporate histories or archives—should be labeled “private history,” and if work outside disciplinary norms should be called “popular history.” Cathy Stanton identified a radical strain in North American public history but asked how much room it has for progressive goals. Hilda Kean and Paul Ashton pointed out differences in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S., arguing against a rigid line between historians and their publics. A 2008 survey of nearly 4,000 practitioners, mostly in the U.S., found that almost a quarter had reservations about the term and whether it applied to their own work. Most who use the term accept that the field’s boundaries are flexible. The contrast between public and academic history complicates who gets to shape accepted history. John Tosh noted that oral history—where people are interviewed about their memories—often sparks the most productive discussions. The definition remains a work in progress, constantly reshaped by practitioners’ relationships with different audiences, goals, and settings. Historian Guy Beiner criticized the common view of public history for overlooking “the countless intimate spheres in which history is retold surreptitiously,” concluding that the connections between private and public forms of history still need to be explored.

Related fields include applied history, archival science, cultural heritage management, digital history, heritage interpretation, historic preservation, historical archaeology, museology, oral history, public humanities, and popular history. Over the past few decades, a sub-field of scholarly study has also emerged, focusing on the history and theory of collective memory and history-making—this too can be considered public history.

Public history has many antecedents: history museums, historical societies, public and private archives, hereditary and memorial associations, preservation groups, government heritage projects, and depictions of history in popular culture like historical fiction. Ludmilla Jordanova noted that the state is central to public history, linking it to the rise of the nation-state. (In 1794, theologian William Paley described public history as 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, history became a distinct academic discipline within Western universities, gradually separating professional scholars from amateur or public practitioners. Although some trained historians continued working in public settings, by the mid-twentieth century, professional historians had largely retreated from public engagement. During the 1970s, a mix of political, economic, social, and historiographical developments began to change that.