A Companion to Public History

David M. Dean

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119130697, 9781118508947
• eBook ISBN: 9781118508923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An authoritative overview of the developing field of public history reflecting theory and practice around the globe

This unique reference guides readers through this relatively new field of historical inquiry, exploring the varieties and forms of public history, its relationship with popular history, and the ways in which the field has evolved internationally over the past thirty years. Comprised of thirty-four essays written by a group of leading international scholars and public history practitioners, the work not only introduces readers to the latest scholarly academic research, but also to the practice and pedagogy of public history. It pays equal attention to the emergence of public history as a distinct field of historical inquiry in North America, the importance of popular history and 'history from below' in Europe and European colonial-settler states, and forms of historical consciousness in non-Western countries and peoples. It also provides a timely guide to the state of the discipline, and offers an innovative and unprecedented engagement with methodological and theoretical problems associated with public history.

Generously illustrated throughout, The Companion to Public History's chapters are written from a variety of perspectives by contributors from all continents and from a wide variety of backgrounds, disciplines, and experiences. It is an excellent source for getting readers to think about history in the public realm, and how present day concerns shape the ways in which we engage with and represent the past.

• Cutting-edge companion volume for a developing area of study
• Comprises 36 essays by leading authorities on all aspects of public history around the world
• Reflects different national/regional interpretations of public history
• Offers some essays in teachable forms: an interview, a roundtable discussion, a document analysis, a photo essay.
• Covers a full range of public history practice, including museums, archives, memorial sites as well as historical fiction, theatre, re-enactment societies and digital gaming
• Discusses the continuing challenges presented by history within our broad, collective memory, including museum controversies, repatriation issues, 'textbook' wars, and commissions for Truth and Reconciliation

The Companion is intended for senior undergraduate students and graduate students in the rapidly growing field of public history and will appeal to those teaching public history or who wish to introduce a public history dimension to their courses.

Part I
Identifying Public History

Chapter One
Complicating Origin Stories: The Making of Public History into an Academic Field in the United States¹

Rebecca Conard

What’s in a name?

In the inaugural issue of The Public Historian, the late Robert Kelley, who coined the term “public history,” offered a brief account of “Its Origins, Nature, and Prospects” (1978). Actually, he skirted the matter of origins, as if this were obvious, and opened with a straightforward definition of public history as “the employment of historians and the historical method outside academia” (Kelley 1978: 16). The phrase “and the historical method” soon disappeared from what became the fallback definition of public history in the United States, but Kelley had a more complex idea in mind when he and Wesley Johnson conceived the idea of a graduate program in Public Historical Studies at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). In venues “outside academia,” public historians would “work in the decision‐making process as historians [emphasis his], bringing their particular method of analysis and explanation to bear upon points at issue, just as public administrators, economists … and other professionals have brought their expertise into policy making.” As a corollary, public history would “have the result of greatly expanding professional employment for historians,” which was a real concern in the 1970s, when the academic job market for history PhDs contracted (Kelley 1978: 20).

Forty years later, Wesley Johnson, reflecting on the early history of the National Council on Public History, expanded on the nature of the new academic field that he and Kelley conceptualized. Their vision – which might be described as one‐third public intellectual, one‐third public policy specialist, and one‐third community historian or oral historian – was born from their particular experiences as historians. As a graduate student at Harvard and then Columbia, Johnson had studied under luminaries such as William Yandell Elliott and Zbigniew Brzezinski, brilliant scholars who served as advisers to presidents and high government officials. Quite understandably, they became role models for him. The idea that one could become a public intellectual was reinforced during the 18 months he spent in Paris conducting research in French archives for his dissertation. There, the daily press exposed him to “the many people … who wrote for Le Monde and … various magazines and newspapers who were public intellectuals. Maybe they were technically a historian, a political scientist, an economist, a gadfly who was bright. ‘Public intellectual’ was in view, and that’s what I had in my life” (Johnson 2015, interview: 12). After joining the UCSB faculty in 1972, Johnson secured a large grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for a community and oral history project with the City of Phoenix, Arizona. This project, he states, “was very fortuitous because that’s where my public history career started.” Robert Kelley’s route to public history was quite different. After publishing Gold Versus Grain: The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in California’s Sacramento Valley (1959), Kelley found that he was in demand as an expert witness in water litigation cases. After awhile, “he then began teaching some of his students about how history, historian[s], could be helpful to the law in litigation as expert witnesses … and so Bob got the idea … [for] some kind of program in public history” (Johnson 2015, interview: 17–18).

This tripartite vision was the foundation for the UCSB program that began training master’s and doctoral students in fall 1976. The invited participants who assembled in Montecito, California, for the First National Symposium on Public History in 1979 also reflected this vision. Fully half of them held academic positions but also were involved in some activity to reach wider, nonacademic audiences. The other half represented an impressive array of doctorate‐holding historians who worked in the business and corporate world, in federal or state agencies, for historical organizations, for professional organizations, for philanthropic foundations, or as consultants. A few managed large oral history projects. Many held administrative positions with considerable responsibility and authority (First National Symposium on Public History 1979: 73–81).

Missing from this assembly were the leaders of four well‐established professional organizations that represented an even wider world of historical enterprise: the American Association (now Alliance) of Museums, founded in 1906 (AAM), the Society of American Archivists (SAA, 1936), the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH, 1940), and the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP, 1949). Nor were they invited to a follow‐up meeting in Washington, DC, where a steering committee laid plans to form the National Council on Public History. Johnson (2015, interview: 44) explains that “we were very insistent … on creating something new,” meaning a new field of history, firmly based in the methods of historical research and analysis, and not just promoting alternative careers for historians who could not find academic positions. Even so, it was an omission that soon revealed a deep divide between academicians and the world of historical practice in nonacademic settings. On the one hand, many academic historians dismissed public history as a fad or a fool’s errand. On the other, professional organizations were already involved in graduate‐level training for professional work in museums, archives, government agencies, and other organizations engaged in history‐based activities. As a result, the upstart public history movement was greeted with irritation, even hostility, among academics and professional practitioners alike.²

This essay aims to complicate the origin story, although it does not purport to be “the” history of public history, which would require a more sweeping inquiry. Among other things, I ignore the long tradition of historians who have served as public intellectuals as well as the historians who entered government service. Nor do I address the legions of amateur historians who have participated in the processes of history making since time immemorial. Rather, the aim is a more complete understanding of public history as an academic field, albeit one for which a clear definition is still elusive. Thus, this essay sketches the role of professional organizations in shaping graduate training. It also addresses a competing concept of public history as people’s history, which challenged the notion that public history was simply nonacademic history. As a corollary, I consider the ways in which scholars working in new social history – and other disciplines – helped shape public history into an academic field. The ultimate goal is a better understanding of why public history, which was variously contested and dismissed in the crucial period of the mid‐1970s to mid‐1980s, nonetheless had the power to coalesce a disparate aggregation of historians into a movement that could sustain a new scholarly journal, a new professional association, and, ultimately, a new academic field.

The early landscape of professional training

Historians were key players in founding three of the four professional associations named above – SAA, AASLH, and NTHP – and continued to play leadership roles for many decades. Although historians were not involved in AAM’s founding, eventually they joined the fold and assumed leadership positions in that organization, too. Importantly, because advanced degrees were considered essential, or at least desirable, for managing larger archives, museums, and historical organizations, professional associations monitored, nurtured, and then sought to order graduate training for professional practice.

Professional training for museum work came first. Between 1910 and 1940, several museums initiated in‐house training programs and apprenticeships, and a few universities began to offer courses in museum methods. These early course offerings and programs were allied with the disciplines of natural history, art, and art history, reflecting the way museums professionalized along disciplinary lines (Coleman 1939; Teather 1991).³ Even though the vast majority of museums in the United States were (and still are) history museums, training programs did not begin to address the needs of history museums until the late 1940s. From 1949 into the 1950s, the National Park Service (NPS) ran in‐service training course in museum methods, both curatorial and interpretive, for its growing inventory of history and natural history museums (NCHSB Quarterly Report March 1950; Lewis October 1941). In 1948, the New York State Historical Association (NYSHA) began offering summer seminars on American social history and folk culture for museum interpretation and the restoration of historic buildings (NCHSB Quarterly Report March 1949). As museum‐training programs proliferated, AAM took stock and in 1965 published a 30‐page booklet on Museum Training Courses in the United States and Canada. At that time, only the Winterthur program at the University of Delaware and the Cooperstown Graduate Program in Museum Studies at the State University of New York, Oneonta, offered museum training that specifically addressed the needs of historic house museums and historic sites.

The SAA began to lay the groundwork for professional education immediately after it organized in 1936. A committee established to examine the training of archivists recommended an approach that privileged history. Having borrowed archival theory from European sources, American historian‐archivists also sought to model training programs after European practices, with administrators and managers “recruited from the level of training required for the degree of doctor of philosophy in American history.” But librarians also exerted influence in the professionalization process, which the committee back‐handedly acknowledged by recommending training for a second class of archivists – those who wanted to prepare for jobs in business or local archives – at a level “equal to that of the Master’s degree in the social sciences, with a support in library technique” (Bemis 1939: 157–159).

During the next three decades, archival education emerged with one foot planted in history and the other in librarianship. The early landscape included a mix of short courses, summer institutes, and graduate programs. The latter included a collaborative program between the National Archives and American University, which began in 1939, and another collaborative undertaking, launched in 1952, between the Colorado State Archives and the University of Denver’s School of Librarianship and Department of History. In a slightly different vein, Philip Mason, Director of the Labor History Archives at Wayne State University, teamed up with the History Department in the early 1960s to create an archival administration specialization for the master’s degree (Jones 1968). By the late 1960s, four universities were offering graduate programs in archival administration, while ten others were offering short courses or summer institutes.⁴

Professional training for work in historic preservation has a shorter history. In 1949, American University, in cooperation with the NPS and Colonial Williamsburg (CW), began offering an intensive summer Institute in the Preservation and Interpretation of Historic Sites and Buildings. It was hailed as “the only special course now being offered in this country” (NCHSB Quarterly Report March 1949; December 1949; December 1950). In 1962, when historical architect Charles Peterson retired from the NPS – after directing the Historic American Building Survey for nearly 30 years – he took his expertise to Columbia University. There, he worked with the School of Architecture to develop the first graduate program in historic preservation, anchored in architectural design, not history (Peterson 1982, interview: 20–22).

By the early 1960s, graduate education for professional work in institutions that preserved, managed, and interpreted history had begun to gain traction. Interdisciplinary and collaborative ventures characterized the advance guard. The most ambitious initiative was the Seminar in Historical Administration, which warrants special attention because it involved three of the four professional associations, and it persists to the present day.

The seminar in historical administration

Shortly after New Year’s Day in 1957, historian Edward P. Alexander, then vice president and director of interpretation at CW, sat down and drafted a proposal for an eight‐week “historical preservation seminar,” which he shared with a few staff members and close academic colleagues, including historian Richard McCormick of Rutgers University. “We were all a little worried in the historical agency field,” he later recalled, “because so many poorly trained people were going into historical society and museum work.” While waiting for replies to his letters, he had lunch with Richard Howland, president of the NTHP, to discuss “setting up this Seminar on a cooperative basis.” Anxious to secure the approval if not cooperation of lea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue
• Part I: Identifying Public History
• Part II: Situating Public History
• Part III: Doing Public History
• Part IV: Using Public History
• Part V: Preserving Public History
• Part VI: Performing Public History
• Part VII: Contesting Public History
• Epilogue: To Put Your Signature: Tanzania’s Graffiti Movement
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement