Thursday, August 25, 2016

What IS Public History?

The National Council on Public History describes the field as a vast assortment of various individuals working together to tell a story outside of the classroom. Public historians can range from museum curators to reenactors to film producers and they call from a wide variety of backgrounds. Public history is there for those people who weren’t able to connect with history in their high school or college experiences and connect more with hands on history such as national parks, museums, etc. In his essay, Carl Schulz examines the common themes of public history: “the insistence that the primary sources for understanding the past are not limited to the written word but encompass buildings, sites, landscapes, artifacts, orally transmitted memories, visual materials, and most recently, electronic recordings…” which should “provide meaning to the specific details of the historical problems which public historians are charges with solving…” (Schulz 32-33).  
In the Schulz essay he compares and contrasts the academic historian to the public historian. Academics can mostly be found in university settings and almost always consider themselves historians, taking the same track as each other, etc. The public historian however can come from a variety of places. More so now than ever before, public historians are coming out of universities. The irony of this is pointed out in Schulz’s essay where public historians are getting their education from academics. Why is this ironic?  Public historians can come from a wider variety of places and not all public historians may consider themselves historians. Some may have experience in library science while others may have a background in media or the visual arts or even the performing arts and decide to tell a story and present it for a public audience. In fact one of the main differences between a historian and a public historian is that public historians are more collaborative. They are not just collaborating with other professionals in their fields, sometimes they are working alongside members of their community, artists, filmmakers, etc to try and make history as accessible for the general public as possible. As the study of public history and the movement for this academic study becomes more popular, the two disciplinary tracks are becoming increasingly similar as both change with the times. In the more recent past, more and more public historians are coming from graduate training programs in universities with more programs being established for training purposes. The public history movement was begun at the University of California in Santa Barbara by Robert Kelley in 1978 and a few years later the National Council on Public History was established. “From its earliest years, NCPH has played a role in defining for history departments the training and education necessary to transform history graduate students into public historians.” (Schulz 31). In 1986, the NCPH published its first comprehensive list of graduate programs being offered for future public historians. These public history programs which vary from the traditional graduate history program are purported to supply their students with the opportunity to learn traditional skills such as research, interpretation and writing. This is just one example of how academic history and public history can sometimes merge.
Carl Becker in his essay, “Every Man His Own Historian” reminds us that the study of history is more or less a collective agreement about what may have happened. History is malleable. No one can argue that particular events did occur; but what is always changing is our perception of them. History is alive because it is always changing and it never ceases to exist. Becker throughout his essay compares academic history to the everyday common place or “Everyman” historian. Everyone knows that certain things happen and even if they don’t or just don’t remember correctly, nothing will really change and everyone will continue on with their own personal recollection of a historical event whether it’s about the signing of the Declaration of Independence or their own person history. The academic is not that much different from the common man because historians can also fashion history with “fact” as well as “interpretation.”  Katherine Corbett and Howard Miller describe this collaboration as ‘shared inquiry”. Their definition of shared inquiry is collaboration between historians to answer historical questions. They point out that all historians must collaborate; but it is the specific job of the public historian to “collaborate, to respond, to share both inquiry and authority…” (Corbett, Miller 15). According to the National Council on Public History, more so now than ever before has public history and academic history experienced this shared inquiry as the study of history itself has become more and more interdisciplinary.






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