PATRICE GREEN, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA
Proposal Type
Roundtable
Seeking
- Seeking Additional Presenters
- Seeking Specific Expertise
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
Related Topics
- Advocacy
- Public Engagement
- Reflections on the Field
Abstract
Defining public history has been a challenge in the last forty years. Perhaps a bigger challenge has been defending it – to friends, relatives, administrators, and most unfortunately – other historians. A significant part of defending ourselves and our relevance leans heavily on redefining what it means to be an historian and reintroducing people – scholars and otherwise – to the profession.
Description
Public historians have spent the last forty years of our formal establishment defining, redefining, and defending our work. As 21st century scholars, public historians operate in a world that allows for a wide diversity of opportunities and ways in which to redefine the role of the historian. In all of our years “putting history to work in the world,” we must still challenge a highly romanticized monolith of our field’s purpose that’s projected onto us by “traditional” historians and the general public alike. So, what do historians do? What is our agenda? What is the meaning of our work? Various scholars and publications – namely The Chronicle of Higher Education – have voiced their opinions about everything from why there are less history majors to why humanities degrees should be deemed useless. Other scholars, such as Nina Simon in her famed Ted Talk “The Art of Relevance,” highlight the importance of keeping cultural institutions relevant in their communities. Bringing together opposing ideas from The Chronicle and from “The Art of Relevance,” how do we reintroduce people to the field of history as we go forward?
In this session, representatives from various sectors of the profession will discuss their ways of reintroducing the public – or even the classroom – to history. Whether through pedagogy and instruction, programming and public engagement, exhibition and web design, or even accessions and donor relations, our charge for the next forty years is to integrate the monolith and show that public history IS traditional history.
I’d love to have a range of historians talk about their roles and what makes them relevant in the field today. I’m sure this could use some narrowing and refining, and any advice is welcome.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Patrice Green, [email protected]
All feedback and offers of assistance should be submitted by July 1, 2019. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
The NCPH Conference is probably the only place where us Public Historians go and do not have to explain/defend Public History (which is one of the reasons why we love it). I think this is a great topic proposal and a necessary conversation to have. I’d love to hear what you and others have to say about redefining Public History so that we don’t always have to be scrambling for the simplest way to define PH to our families, friends, and other fields.
Hi Patrice!
Your topic proposal is spectacular. I’d be interested to find out how your discussants define a “historian” and their work – and how they might arbitrarily differentiate between modifiers like traditional, institutional, public, grassroots, etc. What is “the field” or “the profession,” a “scholar” or a “practitioner” even? Why are certain terms and their connotations favored or avoided?
Personally, I’d argue that “true” history-making takes place outside of these labels, especially those that reinforce elitist ideas about who gets to explore the past and how it’s done, from top to bottom – its documentation, preservation, and interpretation. After all, people have engaged the past through oral tradition and myth-making, politics and spirituality, for millennia. Its credentialization and commodification is dangerous.
In fact, maybe public history isn’t traditional history. Maybe public history surpasses (or has the potential to surpass, despite the field’s gentrification by the white middle class) traditional history to get at a more authentic, accurate account of the past. Public history, at its core, deals in our collective historical consciousness, a crowdsourced account of what was – something that traditional history seeks to undermine by endowing a select group of people with the “authority” to comprehend it.
In other words, why should we have to defend public history when it has the power to weed out all that’s wrong with traditional history – to decolonize and decentralize a historiography crafted in the ivory tower?