Week One

The great divide between academia and the rest of the world is lamentable. It is the joke of many history departments that historians write for each other and that David McCullough and Stephen Ambrose write for everyone else. This week’s readings centered on the midline between the professional historian and the public and how many public historians are actively trying to bridge the gap.
According to the public, what are the purposes of history? Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life ask that question and others to over 2,000 interviewees. Their methodology resembles that of an anthropologist and their conclusions are very interesting. Overwhelmingly the respondents seemed to separate what they termed as “history” and “the past”. “History” was a subject taught in schools, most often about the formation of nation-states. “The past”, however, was intrinsically connected to the present and thusly linked to much of the public. The authors reported that interviewees did not see the past as “distant, abstract, or insignificant” and that they “pursue the past actively and make it a part of their everyday life,” (Rosenzweig and Thelen, 18). According to Rosenzweig and Thelen, the past is always involved in the shaping of the present and never really separate at all.
The authors also reported that the public did purposefully seek a connection to their past, or heritage, through artifacts, museums, elderly relatives, and other forms of media. The respondents emphasized family as their greatest connection to the past. They also argued that they considered family members to be among the most trustworthy keepers of historic knowledge.
Cathy Stanton’s article began as various responses on H-Net to the definition of “public history” as provided by the National Council on Public History. Their definition is “public history is a movement, methodology, and approach that promotes the collaborative study and practice of history; its practitioners embrace a mission to make their special insights accessible and useful to the public." It is easy to see why this definition would create a firestorm among public historians. Firstly, can there be an official methodology for all public history? Other historians argued that calling public history a “movement” was too political. However, the most problematic portion of the definition is that historians may “make their special insights accessible and useful to the public.” This kind of elitist statement argues that professional academics have the keys to deciphering history and that they must dutifully make the past available to the public. Public history should be an exchange between professional historians and their audiences.
This exchange between historians and the public is addressed by Corbett and Miller’s article on shared authority. This article seems to be a more in touch with reality that the opinion shared by the NCPH. Corbett and Miller describe the interplay between historians and audiences and argue that the public has quite a bit of power over public historians. An example of this is oral history: historians can initiate and interview but what is revealed and to whom are entirely in the hands of the respondent. Historians and audiences share agency in the creation of public history (Corbett and Miller, 20). Because of this shared authority and agency historians must be willing to tweak presentations of the past. In fact, historians and the public most often butt heads when the professional wants to display a person or group’s past in a way that is unfamiliar or controversial. The Smithsonian’s Enola Gay debacle is a great example of this.
What Corbett, Miller, Rosezweig, Thelen, and Stanton all want professional historians to understand is that a public historian’s responsibility is to engage the public. This commitment to a public audience should shape the historian’s methodology. Corbett and Miller propose that the public historian is the mediator between the truth they want to present and the truth the public wants to hear (38). However, this balance is easy to discuss but difficult to put into practice. If public historians always catered to the public this way then sites of history would most likely be shrines or temples rather than forums of discussion. This does not help anyone, historian or other, to come to terms with their past.