Imagining a Future for Public History
22 September 2025 – Adina Langer
Like so many members of our professional community, I have been buffeted by the steady stream of blows to the field these past several months––blows that I can’t help but take personally. The financial and ideological foundations of what I’ve come to understand as public history in the twenty-first century have been under attack from an administration that made culture war escalation a hallmark of its first 100 days.
The “flood the zone” tactics of the second Trump administration and its allies have been tailor-made to encourage reaction to each new executive order, fired leader, or funding cut, from within the confines of our specific targeted communities. With each new outrage, I have been grateful to NCPH leadership for quickly-mustered “advocacy alerts” and “call-to-action” briefings. But in the quiet moments between calls to senators and petition signings, I have longed for something beyond the reactiveness of the current moment.
Despite all the evidence outlined above, I remain buoyed by hope–a powerful, if not exactly rational–tool for dark times. In an effort to provide a more holistic response, I share these musings on a future for public history. Such a future must be sustainable, equitable, and true to our core values.
In a column authored for the organization’s quarterly newsletter in 2024, and reprinted in early 2025, NCPH’s president Denise Meringolo wrote: “The question is not whether or not we should engage pressing political issues. The question is how best to connect with one another and a new and growing body of partners to put the past to work on behalf of the present and the future.” In this statement, Meringolo identified one of the core values of the field as I’ve come to understand it in the months since: public history is future-oriented and unabashedly committed to social justice.
Public history has always sought a “usable past,” but the past ten years have marked an embrace of justice advocacy among public history professionals and grassroots practitioners alike. One need look no further than responses to recent NCPH annual meeting themes (for me, the 2018 Power Lines conference solidified this orientation) to see this trend in action, or to the publication of the NCPH Values Statement in 2024, to see it articulated. Gone is the dichotomy between rigor and advocacy. Both are embraced, while nostalgia is left in the dust.
At the same time, public historians have expressed concern about the sustainability of the field–both as a viable profession that compensates workers fairly, and as an endeavor that can support itself financially, without bowing to interests with differing, or downright antithetical, priorities. To support these three pillars of twenty-first century public history–what I am calling sustainability, equity, and integrity–I am imagining a new way to organize the field, from soup to nuts.
What I imagine is a cross between a union, a firm, and a guild. In this future manifestation, public history would be emancipated from the university, the government, and the private sector while potentially maintaining ties to all three. In this vision of the future, I begin with a new version of NCPH, still controlled by its membership, but with multiple local chapters, that has taken over training, fundraising, and contracting in the field. This version of NCPH would maintain its commitment to transparency, reviewing and publishing up-to-date values statements and codes of conduct for employees and clients alike.
As a firm, this organization would employ public historians directly, paying them for work at various levels depending on their training, expertise, and experience. As a guild, this organization would offer mentorship, training, and certification for people at every stage of their career, from high school students to PhD-level researchers. Rather than relying on frameworks more relevant to universities or gatekeeper publishers, an organization employing this model for educating public historians would maintain alignment with the priorities of the field, including a commitment to relevance and respect for community partners. Finally, as a union, this organization would continue to advocate flexibility and offer membership to individuals employed elsewhere, potentially providing access to healthcare for consultants and mutual aid for members in need of assistance for various reasons throughout their career.
Pie in sky. Photos and composite courtesy of the author.
In my imagined future, people who support public history would become “patrons” of NCPH similarly to how people support local NPR affiliates through membership or artists through platforms like Patreon. These memberships, paired with direct contracting from clients required to adhere to the NCPH ethical codes, would support the work of public history. Governments could choose to contract for the services of public historians, but public history would not rely on government funding or the support of one political party or another. Likewise, private clients would also need to respect the NCPH codes of conduct with regards to the integrity of research and interpretation in order to gain the services of affiliated public historians.
NCPH would attract clients through the excellent reputation of its workers, their processes, and their products. Supported by these patrons, public historians would also be free to take on work for organizations and communities lacking resources to pay on a fee-for-service basis. Thus, public historians would be able to share their expertise in support of the social justice mission they value.
In imagining this future, it is, of course, necessary to identify and accept the potential pitfalls of such an approach. As long as we live in a society with polarized values, we cannot expect to retain a monopoly on public culture. Competing organizations would likely vie for public history clients by embracing nostalgia and committing to the preservation of social hierarchies through the suppression of evidence and promotion of archival silences. (See the Heritage Foundation’s critique of the award-winning reimagining of interpretation at James Madison’s Montpelier as a good example of this alternative perspective on public history.) This future NCPH would have to balance its desire to dominate the field with its commitment to just and equitable practices within and without. The temptation to use coercive tactics to maintain a monopoly would inevitably present itself. Internal factionalization might also cause problems if not adequately anticipated through a robust organizational constitution.
But as long as I’m imagining the future, I will imagine one in which our fundamental values win out because they are sound. Through a shared commitment to sustainability, equity, and integrity, we will carry public history into the foreseeable future and beyond.
~Adina Langer is a public historian based in Atlanta, Georgia. She has served as co-editor of History@Work since 2012. You can find her online at www.artiflection.com