By Debra DeRuyver
Written & Mounted September 10, 2000
It seems odd, wanting to write a history of public history-- especially in the space of a few short paragraphs. Where does one start? With the development of historical societies in the
19th century?(1) With turn of the century official military histories or the management of Civil War battlefields through the War
Department?(2) With the museum
movement?(3) The preservation
movement?(4) The New Deal development of historic national parks in the
1930s.(5) The establishment of the National Archives
in 1934.(6) Why be so provincial as to limit oneself to the United States only?
What seems clear is that public history in the United States began with the emergence of a cultural desire in the late 19th century to understand the U.S. as a nation with a national culture and history. This desire was intimately connected with both the rise of US imperialism and the rise of immigrant populations perceived as needing institutions of Americanization. These desires forged the many different streams that now meet on the common ground of "public history" as an academic discipline and a profession.(7) The twentieth century trajectory of public history is an arc toward professionalization and standardization as well as, most particularly in the latter half of the century, a movement away from the taint of ethnocentrism implicit in its earliest endeavors.
As several contemporary writers have noted, the development of, for example, public history museums in the U.S. was one way that the wealthiest members of society were able to appropriate the past for their own purposes.(8) The embrace of social and radical history by many public historians marks one such departure from these origins.
The decades surrounding World War II saw a dramatic increase in the number of academically trained historians with advanced degrees working as public servants in the employ of federal, state, and local governments. Concomitant with those workers came the passage of legislation like the Historic Sites Act in 1935 and the development of public programs (e.g. Colonial National Historical Park), institutions (e.g. the National Archives), and publications (e.g. Forest Pogue's The Supreme Command) that could be used by people throughout the country as models of how one could go about "public history" with integrity to the historical record and responsibility to the publics making this work possible through their tax dollars.(9)
Although the work of public historians became more routinized during this period, training-- at a University level-- did not. An academic degree in history did not guarantee one success as a public historian. As Verne Chatelain-- the first Chief Historian of the National Park Service put it-- many historians "couldn't translate themselves into Park Service men, thinking Park Service ideas. Some were good in the books, but they couldn't deal with the public. Some were good in the books, but they couldn't deal with the physical conditions on the ground."(10) New methods of presentation, of inquiry and a valuing of different kinds of primary source material needed to be developed in response to these challenges. Forest Pogue's development of oral history as a method of historical inquiry during his years as an Army historian is one such example.(11) Public History, as a distinct set of methods, theories, and practices reached a turning point with the establishment of its first academic program at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the mid 1970s, the subsequent launch of public history's flagship journal, The Public Historian, and the development of the National Council on Public History, a non-profit professional organization.(12), (13) Since then, public history as a discipline has grown to the point where over sixty programs in the US and abroad offer-- at minimum-- tracts in public history within advanced degree programs.(14) Public history topics appear as regular features in a multitude of historical journals. And, the NCPH's annual conference draws together colleagues from many
different fields.(15 )
Today public historians can receive academic training that prepares them for historical work in a wide variety of fields ranging from education and exhibit design to preservation and document management, from policy advice and legal consultation to documentary film making and media programming, from archeology to Web site designer.(16)
I invite our readers to comment on this brief history and to offer their own understanding of public history's past. Comments can be sent directly to editors@publichistory.org.
Notes
1.
Stephen L. Recken, "Doing Public History: A Look at the How, but Especially
the Why," American Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 1 (March 1993): 189 [return
to text]
2.
Charles B. Hosmer, Jr. "Verne E. Chatelain and the Development of the
Branch of History of the National Park Service," The Public Historian,
Vol. 16, No. 1 (Winter 1994): 32; Forrest C. Pogue and Holly C. Shulman,
"Forrest C. Pogue and the Birth of Public History in the Army,"
The Public Historian, Vol. 15 No. 1 (Winter 1993): 44. [return
to text]
3.
Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York:
Routledge, 1995). [return to text]
4.
Hosmer, 25-38. [return to text]
5.
Hosmer, 25-38. [return to text]
6.
National Archives and Records Administration, "What is Nara: The
Records,"
http://www.archives.gov/about_us/what_is_nara/what_is_nara.html?page=2
[return to text]
7.
Philip V. Scarpino, "Common Ground: Reflections on the Past, Present, and
Future of Public History and the NCPH," The Public Historian, Vol.
16, No. 3 (Summer 1994): 11-21. [return to text]
8.
Michel Wallace, "Visiting the Past," in Susan Porter Benson, et. al, Presenting
the Past: Essays on History and the Public, (Philadelphia: Temple U.P.,
1986): 158; Duncan. [return to text]
9.
Hosmer; Pogue and Shulman; W. Andrew Achenbaum, "Public History's Past,
Present, and Prospects," The American Historical Review, Volume 92,
Issue 5 (Dec. 1987): 1164. [return to text]
10.
Hosmer, 33. [return to text]
11.
Pogue and Schulman.
[return to text]
12.
Robert Kelley, "Public History: Its Origins, Nature, and Prospects," Public Historian
Vol. 1 (Fall 1978): 16-28; Scarpino. [return to text]
13.
Of course the definition of public history as a discipline is
debatable. Is it multi-disciplinary? inter-disciplinary?
trans-disciplinary? Or, are there enough meta-disciplinary methods and theories
that link the multiple strands of public history together to warrant thinking
about it as a discipline in and of itself? [return
to text]
14.
Public History Resource Center's, "Where to Study Public History,"
www.publichistory.org\education\where_study.asp.
[return to text]
15.
Scarpino. [return to text]
16.
To learn more about employment visit the Public History Resource Center's
"Where to Practice Public History
[return to text]
Additional Resources
Barbara J. Howe and
Emory L. Kemp, eds., Public History: An Introduction (Malabar, FL: Robert
E. Krieger, 1986).
David F. Trask
and Robert W. Pomeroy III, eds., The Craft of Public History: An Annotated
Select Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983).
Michael
Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and
Public History (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990).
