What’s in a Name?

Many H-Public readers will recall how the New York Times began its
3/4/07 obituary appreciation of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.: "With the
death last week of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., at 89, America lost its
last great public historian." The announcement of our collective demise
was premature, but a telling measure of public confusion about who we
are and what we do.

 What the Times writer probably meant was something like "public
intellectual," but that hardly describes our work. Definitions of
public history, none yet entirely satisfactory, continually come and
go. Each of us has our own, and in-house most of us could probably make
do with some variation on Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of
pornography: "I shall not attempt further to define the kinds of
material I understand to be embraced,…but I know it when I see it."

When we deal with the outside world, however, we urgently need – and
our publics deserve – a description of public history that is
realistic, succinct, and immediately intelligible. The NCPH Board
recently adopted a new definition and announced it at the annual
conference in Santa Fe. It reads:

"Public history is 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."

Because we are troubled by what this new definition both includes and
omits, we want to offer some comments, and suggest an alternative
phrasing, in the hope that both will spark broad H-Public discussion.

We question whether public history is a movement, a methodology, or
even an approach. "Movement" does reference the social activist impulse
that launched public history in the 1970s and continues to give it
vitality, but since then public history has become so well entrenched
in graduate programs and professional organizations that reformist
terminology no longer seems apt. We also doubt that public history has,
or needs, a distinctive "methodology." Public historians apply tried
and true historical methods, collaborative strategies, and specialized
techniques from other disciplines to theirwork at hand.
"Approach" seems too ambiguous to be informative.

We find the phrase "embrace a mission to make their special insights
accessible" particularly unfortunate. By assigning agency to the
missionaries, the phrase denies lay people a creative role. "Special
insight" builds a wall between public historians and the publics they
serve. Public historians may bring disciplined knowledge and analytic
savvy to the table, but they cannot claim special access to Higher
Truths. 

As a springboard for further discussion, we offer the following
description of public history that emphasizes the collaborative
character of the enterprise and the shared agency of everyone involved.

"Public history practice is a multidimensional effort by historians and
their publics, collaborating in settings beyond the traditional
classroom, to make the past useful in the present."
                                                                        
                                    Kathy Corbett
                                                                        
                                  Gorham, Maine

Dick Miller
                                                                        
                                 Morro Bay, California

 

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