Reflections on the founding of NCPH

13 February 2015 – editors

In recent months the NCPH Council of Past Presidents has discussed ways to honor some of the individuals who founded the National Council on Public History in 1980. As a result, at the 2015 NCPH Annual Meeting in Nashville, G. Wesley Johnson and Robert Pomeroy will receive the inaugural NCPH Founders Award, and they and others of the first NCPH generation will be invited to participate in an oral history project to be organized by the Council of Past Presidents. In this post, two past presidents, Ted Karamanski (Loyola University Chicago), and Rebecca Conard (Middle Tennessee State University) offer their personal reflections on the contributions of Johnson and Pomeroy to the organization and the field. For a brief history of NCPH’s early years, see Barb Howe’s “Reflections on an Idea: NCPH’s First Decade,” The Public Historian, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer 1989).

Ted Karamanski

G. Wesley Johnson visited the IUPUI Archives, which holds the NCPH early materials, in May 2012 to discuss turning over his some of his papers. Photo credit: John Dichtl

In September 1979, when Loyola was considering a program in public history, our chairman Robert W. McCluggage understood we would face some opposition in the department. I had drafted a tentative program for a public history MA. To help smooth the road for our efforts, McCluggage contacted Wes Johnson at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and invited him to come to Chicago to talk about public history. In April 1979, using a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, UCSB had held the three-day “First National Symposium on Public History” at a retreat center in Montecito, California.  Wes Johnson was traveling the country as a “Johnny Appleseed” of public history. He certainly worked his magic at Loyola. His enthusiasm for the future of history in America amid the dark shadows of the late 1970s was infectious. After his visit, we had no serious problem getting the department to embrace public history.

Long before Nike made “just do it” a slogan, Johnson put it into practice. Could there be a journal of public history? He made it happen. Should there be an organization for public history? He made it happen. How do we spread best practices for teaching public history? Let’s have a special newsletter (which Barb Howe later expanded). Wes also had an ability to bring people together who shared his enthusiasm and willingness to take a leap into the unknown. Bob Kelley may have had the inspiration for public history at UCSB, but Wes Johnson had the vision, energy, and marketing savvy to make it a national movement. A tech-world analogy would have Bob Kelley as Steve Wozniak and Wes Johnson as Steve Jobs.

Bob Pomeroy should go down in our annals as “the nicest person in public history.” He was a key player in every early action in NCPH’s foundational years. His head for practical details, such as establishing IRS status, bank accounts, and incorporation, was invaluable amid a group of historians learning what it meant to be public, not academic. His gentlemanly manner of moderating the sometimes runaway enthusiasm of colleagues helped keep the organization focused. As NCPH’s first treasurer, he mastered the art of illusion. In those first years of NCPH and long after, he was also a fantastic mentor. To people such as myself who were just learning their way, he was wonderfully encouraging. In later years when my students came to NCPH meetings, he always made a point of seeking out the young people, listening to them, and, in the days before the ease of e-mail or tweets, sending them supportive follow-up notes. Bob Pomeroy helped to build NCPH institutionally, but he also helped to shape its ethos.

These are just some personal thoughts regarding two people who truly deserve to be honored as our founders.

Rebecca Conard

I agree wholeheartedly about Bob Pomeroy being one of the nicest people. “Gentleman” is the word that comes to mind, an enthusiast with great reserve and, as such, the perfect counterpoint to Wes Johnson’s mission-oriented zeal. In this respect, it is somehow fitting that they will be recognized together as the first two recipients of the NCPH Founders Award.

As we think about founders and their contributions to NCPH’s success, let us also think about what was being founded and take care not to create a simplistic origins myth. Bear in mind that in the heady few years after Montecito, there was little awareness that public history already had its own messy history. The discovery by Peter Stearns and Joel Tarr of an early twentieth-century experiment in “applied history” at the State Historical Society of Iowa was only the proverbial tip of an iceberg. As The Public Historian and NCPH gained traction, historians who had been quietly working away for decades in archives, museums, historical societies, and government agencies began to react both positively and negatively. Positively when they experienced a sense of belonging to a movement with a name. Negatively when public history was being promoted as something brand new, seemingly in ignorance of the level of professionalism already achieved by historians working in various arenas outside academia. Some of us remember the initial reaction of the American Association for State and Local History, whose leader at the time asserted that AASLH had been the voice of public history since 1940.

Also, then as now, the term “public history” meant different things to different people, and it took a good many years before we tired of debating the definition question and settled into a big-tent concept of public history. To Bob Pomeroy, I suspect, public history was based in the liberal-arts idea that training in history disciplined the mind for problem solving and clarity of expression–fundamental competencies needed, if not always valued, in many walks of life.

Wes Johnson, in addition to the contributions Ted lists, was a gracious learner. He quickly modified his own pronouncements about the newness of public history to qualify it as a new term that recognized many history-based endeavors “outside” the academy. At the same time, Wes was persistent in his belief that UC Santa Barbara and a handful of other schools were creating a new field of academic study, although at the time no one really had much of a clue as to how graduate students should be trained for public historical practice. Speaking as one who went through the UCSB program in its formative stage, its entire rationale in those days rested on the twin ideas that public historians responded to client-based research problems and should be able to work collaboratively in applying history to meet real-world needs.

The oral history project that the Council of Past Presidents will launch in conjunction with this award at the 2015 annual meeting in Nashville is a tremendous opportunity to ask founders probing questions: about what drew them to this venture, about their aspirations for NCPH, and about the meaning(s) they attached to the term public history. I also hope that this award and the associated oral history project will stimulate more research into the history of public history in the United States. As one who has always believed that public history was much more than a response to the job crisis of the 1970s, I would like to know the who/what/why behind the wave of public history graduate programs launched in the 1970s and early 1980s.

~ Ted Karamanski was chairman of NCPH in 1989-1990, an office that the next year was retitled “NCPH president.” He is Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago and was the founder and later director of Loyola’s Public History Program.

~ Rebecca Conard was NCPH president in 2002-2003. She is professor of history and director of the public history program at Middle Tennessee State University.