What are the success factors for public historians? (Part 1)

02 April 2012 – Darlene Roth

Each paragraph below presents a common public history work scenario that differs – a little or a lot – from traditional academy-based work.  I am looking for comments, suggestions, alternative ideas, and specific examples of what is described.   This was written as a centerpiece for a work session planned for the 2012 annual meeting, but is a topic that deserves widest possible exposure.  It is being cross-posted on the H-Public listserv and I invite comments either here on the blog or on the list.

1) Much public history work, perhaps most, comes to fruition through some kind of group effort – teams of investigators, designers and planners, committees and commissions, task forces, etc., but the traditional success model for historical work is that of a solitary scholar.  What needs to be considered to give proper credit for group efforts? Is it necessary to recognize individual contributions or can just sharing in the group synergy suffice for recognition?  How about serving on commissions and publically appointed committees?  Is this public service or public history?  Both?  What aspects of this service ought to count – e.g., accomplishing a specific agenda item, such as creating a local landmark ordinance, or creating the “first” of something?  Clearly promotion within an organization constitutes success of a kind; by the same token, does leadership of a team, group, or committee constitute an element of success in and of itself regardless of what the team, group, or committee accomplishes?

2) What is to be recognized as historical work?  The presumption is that historians will be doing research and writing, but much public history includes other historically related work before the research begins and after the writing is done.  What part of pre-project and post-project work can count as historical?  What of that can be/should be done by historians?  For example, the identification of an historic property can lead to documentation, preservation, interpretation, and public education; the historian could be in any or all of these activities.  Is it more successful to be involved in all stages?  Or is it essential only to identify and conceptualize the initial stage?  Or to chronicle the activities as or after they have happened?  To plan public programming and/or presentations around the project?  All of the above?  Some of the above?  Should the historian direct the project? Are some levels and stages of development of activities in a public history endeavor more important than others?  If so, why?  How does any of this relate to tracking success?

3) The traditional model of success for a historian rests with scholarship and the publication thereof; in public history projects, scholarship is seldom an end to itself but is usually attached to client agendas – perhaps celebration, investigation, planning, preservation, orientation, group identity, community development, and so on.  Public history rests in scholarship but doesn’t often stay there; quite often there is as much focus on dissemination of knowledge and public education as there is on amassing the knowledge to begin with.  What needs to be taken into consideration for this aspect of public history to be recognized as part of success in public history?  Is client satisfaction sufficient?  Is completion of the project its own reward?  Are there successful outcomes of planning or investigation that could be tracked or counted?  Should testimonials count?  Should evidence be collected that the historical work accomplished what it set out to do – have a successful celebration, conclude an investigation, win a lawsuit, develop what was planned, reframe or cohere group identities, etc.?

4) In the traditional success model, historians succeed who contribute to the field; the form this takes is almost universally and solely an intellectual contribution.  In the public realm, contributions to the field are often quite physical, pragmatic and logistical.  They end up being things like creating jobs, getting work hired out for historians to require actual experience and/or education in history; getting history recognized as part of some area of non-history activity, expanding any activities in other intellectual fields to include historical inquiry and exposition, and so on.  At the same time, the actual intellectual findings of public history inquiry often go unrecognized as contributions to the field because they may not appear on the same platform with the findings of academic inquiry.  There are steps being taken by NCPH to address the latter issue, but what of the former one?  Short of acting as a lobbyist for history/historians is there merit in the logistical efforts enough to count them as a measure of success? And if yes, what are these?

~ Darlene Roth

Part 2 will follow next week.