This article appeared in the September 2007 issue of Public History News, the NCPH's quarterly newsletter.

hneteditor@tiac.net

Following the April 2007 NCPH conference in Santa Fe, a lively discussion developed on the H-Public listserv about the NCPH board’s proposed definition of the field.  An annotated summary of some points from this discussion follows below.  (The full archive of postings can be found via the H-Public website. Visit http://www.h-net.org/~public/ , then click on “Discussion Logs” and choose May, June, and July 2007.) 

The discussion began with a posting from Kathy Corbett and Dick Miller that challenged some features of the board’s proposed definition and offered a somewhat different vision of the field. The board’s draft definition is:

Corbett and Miller questioned whether public history really is a movement, methodology, or even an approach.  “Movement” seemed to them to be apt for the element of social activism that helped to launch public history in the 1970s, but they wondered if the term was still applicable for a field that has become entrenched in graduate programs and professional organizations. They argued that public history neither has nor needs a distinctive methodology, and that “approach” was too broad to be meaningful. 

More importantly, they were troubled by the implication that public historians had a mission to bring a special set of insights to the lay public.  They proposed an alternative definition that emphasized public history as a joint endeavor in which historians and their various publics collaborated in trying to make the past useful to the public.  This change in emphasis, they noted, would acknowledge the agency and creativity of all participants in history-making projects, not just the self-identified public historians.

Listserv members were divided in their opinions about whether public history does constitute a distinct set of methods or approaches.  Some, like Bureau of Land Management Regional Historian Carl Barna, argued that, “Public History is not a movement, nor a methodology, nor an approach.  Doing History in service to the public is simply doing History, no more and no less, and doing it no differently than doing History in the academy… Historians who work in the public area need to be, first and foremost, Historians.…”  Paul Sandul, a graduate student at the University of California/Santa Barbara and California State University/Sacramento, agreed: “[P]ublic history is not a distinct methodology… Indeed, it seems as if we are framing some of this discussion on the notion public history is a separate discipline from academic history instead of just another concentration in much the same manner as, say, economic history, social history, or cultural history.” 

Mary Rizzo, director of education at the New Jersey State House, saw the field as inherently interdisciplinary, like American Studies.  She argued that “rigorous interdisciplinary historical training with an intent to show students how to make scholarly research accessible to the public is necessary. It should also include a strong critical component that will give students the tools to analyze what is being done in the name of public history.”  Taking it a step further, Denise Meringolo, coordinator of the public history track in the MA program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County wrote, “While…public historians MUST be trained first and foremost as historians—to conduct research, to craft an interpretation, to write well—I would argue that this training alone does not prepare someone for work in the public sector… “[P]ublic history" is closely related but distinct from traditional forms of historical professionalism.”

Participants also explored the question of the various “others” and “publics” in relation to whom public historians attempt to define themselves.  One obvious “other,” of course, is academic history, or the academy in general, and several list members spoke about that relationship. J.D. Bowers, history professor at Northern Illinois University, wrote that he envisioned himself as “‘the historian in the middle’ between the academic historians and the general population,” while independent scholar Jane Becker noted that she finds herself thinking of public history as “part of the broad range of humanities scholarship and practice,” which can span disciplinary and popular/academic divides.  Pointing to another of public history’s “others,” Jay Price from Wichita State University stated, “I think the real challenge of definition is not how public history fits against the academic world (we've done that pretty well), but rather, how it fits related to popular history”—something that itself encompasses a wide range of people “with radically different goals and needs.”  Benjamin Filene from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro saw this public/popular history relationship as a reflection of “the belief that history is not just the realm of the experts but of all of us.  Moreover, I feel that the practitioners of these diverse sorts of history-making for varied publics benefit from talking with each other and reflecting on each other’s practices.” 

In terms of what role public historians can and should play in relation to popular history-making such as reenactment, genealogy, community celebrations, and so on, some subscribers spoke about helping to push the boundaries of how people were approaching their own history.  Mary Rizzo felt it was “absolutely essential that public historians try to push people in their understandings of their communities and their history,” including thinking about issues of power and causation, while Denise Meringolo said, “As a public historian, I've begun to think of myself as something akin to a community organizer.… While I have training and interests and curiosities that have led me to become a historian, I became a public historian when I began actively to look for ways to be of service, to listen and learn about the precise needs of a given community, and to gently challenge a community to push its own sense of boundaries and exclusiveness.”  As H-Public’s editor, I weighed in with the notion that another key role public historians seem to play in public projects is to continually broaden narrowly-defined agendas, with an eye toward keeping space open for possible other perspectives, including those that might arise in the future. 

Although the discussion began with the aim of rethinking the NCPH board’s draft definition of public history, one idea that repeatedly emerged from the H-Public discussion was the importance of keeping that definition as open as possible.  Ray Smock, a lifelong public historian and current director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies, wrote, “You would think that someone who has been a public historian for 40 years would have solved some of these definitional questions, but I haven't, although I keep trying.”  Others saw the definitional dilemma as part and parcel of the enterprise of doing public history.  Debbie Ann Doyle, public history coordinator at the American Historical Association, wrote, “Perhaps we should think of public history like gender—a category of identity, complicated, negotiated, and socially constructed in tension with and in opposition to other categories… [Public historical work] requires public historians to engage in a conversation about the nature, meaning, and uses of history of interest to all historians.”  Benjamin Filene concurred: “In a field like ours, the act of definition should be about opening doors, not building walls… Part of the vitality of public history is that any definition we come up with will continue to be fluid.” 

Although the discussion never returned to the concrete task of offering alternative drafts that the NCPH board might consider, Jay Price approached this when he proposed that, “Perhaps at its heart, public history is more of a ‘spirit’ that sees historical scholarship as part of a larger sense that includes both professionals of both academic and non-academic stripes as well as the various segments of the public at large.”  If I had to sum up the vision of public history that emerged from this online conversation, it might be that the participants saw themselves as “historians in the middle”—operating between various constituencies and disciplinary fields, grounded in the methods of the historical discipline, highly attentive to the social processes and political implications of their work, and resistant to too much closure when it comes to defining what they do!

Cathy Stanton is currently the editor of the H-Public listserv, as well as teaching cultural anthropology at Tufts University in Boston and history and cultural studies online at Vermont College of Union Institute & University.  Her book, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006) won the 2007 NCPH Book Award.

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