02/12/16
1
LARGE QUESTIONS IN SMALL PLACES:
LOCAL HISTORY AS PUBLIC HISTORY IN THE US
Several years ago the principal speakers at a major national conference in the United
States titled their session "Large Questions in Small Places." As academic authors writing in the
early 1980s, they had used a local history focus and local history research techniques to write
prize-winning scholarly books which had a large impact on interpreting southern history. Vernon
Burton, In My Father’s House are Many Mansions, traced the evolution of the town and county
in which he was born, Edgefield, South Carolina (also the home of United States Senator Strom
Thurmond) to show the myriad and complicated ways in which slavery and race relations played
out as the south modernized.1 Charles Joyner, in Down by the Riverside, limited himself to a
single South Carolina place, All Saints Parish, to study the evolution of the institution of slavery
and the emergence of a new creolized culture among the African-Americans who constituted
90% of the people in that parish.2
In their studies, these authors applied to the American South an academic history interest
in exploring US local history sources to address larger issues about change over time and the
forces that shape American society in its most fundamental unit, the local community. For the
academy that interest began and flourished in the 1960s and 1970s with studies of New England
that came to be grouped under the label “The New Social History.” In turn, the community
study emphasis of the “New Social History” was itself strongly influenced by approaches to local
history already being pursued in Europe, particularly in the focus on demographic patterns of
change in individual communities pioneered by the "Cambridge Group for the History of
1
Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father's House are Many Mansions : Family and Community in
Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985)
2
Charles W. Joyner, Down by the Riverside : a South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1984).
02/12/16
2
Population and Social Structure" which eventually became a center of renewed academic pursuit
of local history and demographic studies at Leicester University.3
The “New Social History” emerged from and later shaped profoundly a seismic shift in
the approach to writing history among many American academic historians in the aftermath of
the Civil Rights movement, the disillusionment over Vietnam, and the Watergate Scandals. Cary
Carson has called this shift a revolution: a revolution which spread beyond the university history
departments in which it began, the origins of a “populist history which radicalized the study of
local history ultimately to the point of re-educating ordinary people about the nature and practice
of history.”4 In the United States and in Canada, one of the most important means by which the
populist history of the academics has begun to radicalize popular understanding of the past has
been through the field of Public History. Beginning in the 1970s, many graduates of academic
history departments trained in the research and intellectual methodologies of the “New Social
History” became professional historians applying their craft not in the academy, but in local,
state, regional, even national historical and cultural institutions - the museums, the archives, the
historic sites, the National Park Service battlefields.
As the expansion in the academy of research topics drawn from the archives and
3
Among the first works in the "New Social History" of New England are John Demos, A Little
Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970);
Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonia Andover,
Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970); Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New
England Town: The First Hundred Years (New York: W.W. Norton 1970). All borrowed
heavily from quantitative research in family history and especially the analysis of census records
begun during the 1960s by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, published in 1972 in Household and
Family in Past Time (Cambridge 1972). A good early summary of the American academic
discovery of local history can be found in Kathleen Neils Conzen, "Community Studies, Urban
History, and American Local History," in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us:
Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithica, New York: Cornell University
Press, 1980), 270-91.
Cary Carson, "Front and Center: Local History Comes of Age," in Frederick L. Rath et.al.,
Local History, National Heritage: Reflections on the History of the AASLH (Nashville,
Tennessee: AASLH, 1991), 84.
4
02/12/16
3
manuscript collections of particular local communities has been brought back to those
communities by public historians, these scholars working in the public domain frequently find
themselves challenging the understanding of their past held by a community and its local
historians. Sometimes their efforts have created considerable controversy. For the academy,, the
issues, events, and personalities of local history have served as the avenues for exploring more
universal questions of race, of gender, of class, of conflict. In doing so academic historians have
come into conflict with an older sense of the meaning of local history as the story of heroic
founders, of inevitable progress, of cooperation and benevolence, stories carefully nurtured by
amateur local historians who care deeply about and are identified with the communities they
study.5
Frequently it is public historians who stand at the intersection between these two views of
the meaning of local history. Perhaps two examples will illustrate. The Alice Austen House on
Staten Island, New York has been operated by the City of New York Parks Division and the
Friends of Alice Austen House since 1975. The original house, dating from the 1690s and one of
the earliest surviving houses in New York City, was changed significantly in the mid-nineteenth
century by Alice's grandfather. Current interpretation of the house proudly presents its Victorian
interior and gardens and Austen's half century of contributions as a major American female
photographer from the 1880s to the 1930s. Controversy arose in the late 1990s when a
professionally trained staff member dared to suggest that Austen and her lifelong “companion”
may have been lesbian lovers. Discussion of the research that lay behind this conclusion
After an extensive survey of local history writing produced in the U.S., David Russo, Keepers
of Our Past: Local Historical Writing in the United States, 1820s-1930s (New York: 1988)
concluded that it is largely "the story of the successful, by the successful, and for the successful;"
the quotation is from "Some Impressions of the Nonacademic Local Historians and Their
Writings," Carol Kammen, ed., The Pursuit of Local History: Readings on Theory and Practice
(Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press, 1996), 39. Timothy H. Breen offers an interesting
analysis of the conflict of expectations that occurred when he as an academic historian contracted
with the local historical society to write a history of East Hampton, New York; see Imagining
the Past (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1989).
5
02/12/16
4
circulated among museum curators, but no significant change was made either in the
interpretation of the house or in the publicly told story of its owner's life and work. 6
In another example, a considerable furor broke out when a consulting historian
specializing in historic preservation began the research to submit a nomination for listing on the
National Register of Historic Places of sites in the community of Centralia, Washington,
associated with the 1919 riots against the International Workers of the World (IWW, known
familiarly as the "Wobblies"), and the murder of one of its members. The incident is an
important watershed in American labor history, usually described in American history textbooks
as the "Centralia Massacre." The historian initiated the nomination when he discovered that the
events which made the city so prominent in the annals of academic labor history were virtually
invisible in the town itself: no historical sign marked the place where the Wobblies had
barricaded themselves against attacking members of the American Legion; by order of its board
of directors the local history museum offered no exhibits on the events of 1919. "Generations of
Centralia students grew up unaware that events of national importance occurred in their city. For
some time Centralia adolescents might first hear about the events only when they went off to
college in another town." Eventually the National Register nomination was approved, over
opposition both from the city council and private citizens who opposed dredging up "pretty dark
stuff" about their community, and from a representative of the I.W.W. who paradoxically feared
commercialization of a labor shrine, and at the same time characterized the nomination as antilabor.7
The point of both of these cases is that it was the scholarly curiosity and the actions of
page for the Alice Austen House can be found at http://www.aliceausten.8m.com; there is
no mention of her companion in the brief biography of Austen provided there. Much of the
controversy over the issue was reflected in conversations in the electronic discussion list of the
National Council on Public History.
6
7
A web
Robert R. Weyeneth, "History, He Wrote: Murder, Politics, and the Challenges of Public
History in a Community with a Secret," The Public Historian, 16 (Spring 1994) 55, 51-73.
02/12/16
5
“public historians” - an academically-trained curator of an historic house; the Ph.D. historic
preservationist writing the nomination - who brought to light more complex and troubling
versions of the past which conflicted with a community's understanding of what "local history"
was about. How is it possible to reconcile these two understandings of the meaning of local
history?
Is it inevitable that “professional” and “amateur” local historians should be in conflict?
Are there further difficulties between academic and public professional practitioners of the craft
of history? How can these difficulties be resolved? These and related questions are at the core a
perceived conflict of interests which led to the calling of a European conference on "Academic
Local History" whose stated objectives were to "bridge the gap between academic studies of
local history and the recovery and presentation of local history and culture to the general public."
In the United States and Canada, unlike in most of Europe, it is public historians, trained
in academic history departments but most often practicing their craft in local history institutions,
who play the lead role in bridging that gap. The field of public history is fairly new in North
America, having emerged as a description of a particular kind of practicing professional historian
only in the last thirty-five years. The term is used to describe the scholarly contributions and
practical activities of historians trained in history departments within universities in critical
thinking, research, and writing skills, who make their living interpreting the past as archivists,
museum curators, historic preservationists, cultural resource managers, and as historians in
government agencies, in businesses, or private historical consulting firms.8
Prior to the First World War, the idea that a special separate field of "Public History" was
needed or even possible in the United States would have been inconceivable.9 A mastery of
Most of this essay will concentrate on public history as it evolved in the United States. An
overview of the field can be found in James B. Gardner and Peter S. LaPaglia, editors, Public
History: Essays from the Field (Malabar, Florida: Krieger Publishing Company, 1999) and in its
predecessor volume, Barbara J. Howe and Emory L. Kemp, editors, Public History: An
Introduction (Malabar, Florida: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1986).
8
For a brief overview of the emergence of Public History as a field, in addition to the volumes
cited above, see Michael C. Scardaville, "Looking Backward Toward the Future: An Assessment
of the Public History Movement," The Public Historian, 9 (Fall 1987), 35-44; Robert Kelley,
9
02/12/16
6
history was a part of one's education; it was assumed that history had a public role, and that as
the basis of knowledge for educated leaders, it would form the basis of public policy. Moreover,
any educated person was capable of doing history - of analyzing or describing the past by writing
history books. During the American revolutionary generation, Mercy Otis Warren, a
Massachusetts woman, and David Ramsey, a South Carolina physician, each wrote and
published extensive histories of the American struggle for independence.10 When in the early
twentieth century Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt both wrote histories of
the American experience, it was not considered inappropriate or audacious of them to do so.11 In
Britain too public figures have frequently become writers of history, including at mid-twentieth
century Winston Churchill in his multi-volume history of the English-speaking peoples.12 Carl
Becker, the noted early twentieth century American academic historian meant this (among other
things) when he insisted on describing "everyman his own historian."13
"Public History: Its Origins, Nature, and Propspects," The Public Historian 1 (Fall, 1978), 16-28;
and Barbara Howe, "Reflections on an Idea: NCPH's First Decade," The Public Historian, 11
(Summer 1994), 69-85.
10
Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the
American Revolution, Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations
(Boston: Printed by Manning and Loring, For E. Larkin, No. 47, Cornhill, 1805); David Ramsay
(1749-1815), The History of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Printed and sold by
R. Aitken & son, 1789).
11
Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People, 6 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers
Publishers, 1901), written when he was President of Princeton University, and reissued as a
Documentary Edition in 10 vols. in 1917 during his presidency; Theodore Roosevelt, The Naval
War of 1812; or, The History of the United States Navy During the Last War with Great Britain,
2 vols. (New York, G. P. Putnam's sons, 1882) and The Winning of the West, 6 Vols. (New
York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, c1889-c1896), both of which were reissued as part of a 14 volume
Statesman Edition of Roosevelt's works in 1904 (New York: The Review of Reviews Company);
see also Roosevelt's History as Literature, and Other Essays, 1913.
12
Sir Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 4 vols. (New York, Dodd,
Mead, 1956-58.)
13
Carl L. Becker, "Everyman His Own Historian" in Everyman His Own Historian (Chicago:
Quadrangle Books, 1935), 233-55.
02/12/16
7
All this began to change in the late nineteenth century with the professionalization of
history [along with the professionalization of many other professions too, but that's another
story.] For American history, the driving force behind the professionalism of history was the
emergence of a new way of researching and writing about the past, the adoption of the
"scientific" study of history. First taught by Leopold Van Ranke in Europe, the ideal of
"scientific history" was carried to the United States by Herbert Baxter Adams in the new
graduate seminar training programs at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Columbia
University in New York in the 1880s. The true record of the past - History - could not be
resurrected solely from memory, or recorded in anecdotal tales of heroic leaders and triumphant
national origins. It had to be painstakingly pieced together through extensive research in
archives, which not entirely coincidentally were increasingly being kept and systematized in the
late nineteenth century. University seminars trained these new professional historians to subject
their archival sources to rigorous critical evaluation and analysis. No more could "everyman" or
woman have the skills - or the time - to write history; increasingly it belonged to professional
historians trained in and then employed by universities.14
At the same time as the scientific study and writing of history was being coralled and
confined within academic walls, a broad segment of the American public awakened to a new (or
renewed) interest in the past, in a more popular version of history. The 1876 centennial of the
American Revolution was one impetus for this interest. In addition to great celebratory public
commemorations, the centennial spawned a number of hereditary societies. The Daughters of the
American Revolution (DAR) and their smaller partner the Sons of the American Revolution
revitalized American genealogy by requiring potential members to prove the legitimacy of their
14
Patricia Mooney-Melvin provides a good overview of the professionalization of history in
"Professional Historians and the Challenge of Redefinition," in Gardner and LaPaglia, Public
History: Essays from the Field, 5-22.
02/12/16
8
claimed descent from a "Patriot." The homes of the founding generation became sentimental
shrines. Ann Pamela Cunningham, a South Carolina matron, began a successful campaign to
preserve George Washington's home, recruiting members across the nation for her "Mount
Vernon Ladies Association." The Society for Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA)
was founded in 1910 to protect cultural and architectural sites connected to the region's
seventeenth and eighteenth century origins. In the South, the United Daughters of the
Confederacy, founded in 1894 for the female lineal descendants of soldiers who served in the
Confederate forces, became a powerful link to a remembered past. While all of these
movements and organizations were national in scope, and centered on themes or events of
national significance (colonial founding, revolution, civil war) their immediate inspiration and
focus was on local history: GeorgeWashington’s Mount Vernon plantation; the service of a
man in a particular revolutionary war state or local regiment; the organization of Confederate
descendants in a particular community.15
Although the first state historical societies can trace their founding almost as far back as
the founding of the nation - the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1796; the New York
Historical Society in 1804; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the 1820s - the 1876
centennial of American independence sparked the creation of many more local and regional
historical societies to manage the letters, the venerated objects, the historic dwellings of every
15
Judith Anne Mitchell, "Ann Pamela Cunningham : A Southern Matron's Legacy,"
(MA Thesis, Middle Tennessee State University, 1993); Robert F. Dalzell, George Washington's
Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998;
Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America's House Museums
(Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1999).
02/12/16
9
community's founders.16 Recent scholarship has criticized the sometimes openly racist and
unabashedly conservative goals of both the national hereditary organizations and the local
celebretory societies as part of the reaction of Protestant, predominantly paler-skinned earlier
European settlers against the waves of eastern European Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish
darker-skinned immigrants who flooded into the U.S. in the millions at the end of the 19th
century. In the case of the UDC, their role in the romanticizing of the “Lost Cause” of the
Confederate South coincided with wholesale disenfranchisement of black voters and reinstitution
of a white supremicist political settlement in much of the south that has come to be known as
"Jim Crow."17
Ludmilla Jordanova argued throughout her recent study of History in Practice (Arnold,
2000) that all history is essentially political; these late-nineteenth century American popular
history movements seem to us in retrospect clearly to be so. Yet whatever the motivations that
triggered them, they also represent a surge, or a resurgence, of popular interest in the past that
was institutionalized into structured organizational forms. The national organizations which that
resurgence created had local branches; national interest in a common national past stimulated the
emergence of local interest in specific local pasts. Together they generated a category of
educated people, some amateur volunteers, some hired by local communities as professional
16
Kenneth W. Duckett, Modern Manuscripts: A Practical Manual for their Management, Care,
and Use (Nashville: AASLH, 1975) begins with an excellent overview of the founding of local
historical societies, whose earliest function was the collection of historical manuscripts.
17
Valuable contributions to understanding the complex links between commemoration, public
memory and the desire to sanitize the past are Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The
Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991); David
Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985);
David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig, The Presence of the Past : Popular Uses of History in
American Life ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); David Glassberg, Sense of
History: The Place of the Past in American Life ( 2001). The classic statement of the postReconstruction process of legal segregation is C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim
Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).
02/12/16
10
staff, who became responsible for caring for their collections of objects, manuscripts, and
buildings. These caretakers considered themselves to be in some sense historians. The origin of
hereditary and local historical societies also coincided with the establishment of state archival
programs to preserve old and more recent government records that served the needs of - and in
some cases provided archivists’ jobs for graduates of - the new scientific study of history.18
They inspired the creation of museums in small and large communities preserving artifacts from
the revered past.19 All of these were part of a broad public historical movement. The growth of
history as a profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coincided with a
tremendous growth of history as an amateur interest and activity as well
For a while these two American strands of historical study and activity worked together.
When the American Historical Association (AHA) was founded in 1884, half of its members
were deeply involved in or founders of local historical societies; its officers were as likely to be
distinguished public figures with an interest in history as academics. The AHA played an
important role in the move to identify, preserve in archival repositories, and publish key
historical documents of national significance, and for fifty years worked tirelessly for the
creation in 1936 of the National Archives. But gradually after WWI, a period of alienation set
in. Professionally trained historians in the universities, taught to evaluate critically their sources
and their conclusions and committed to an increasingly complex interpretation of the past, often
looked down on local history societies and museum volunteers as amateurs, antiquarians, or
mere collectors. Even their sources and interests differed, the academic professionals seeking
information primarily from written records; the local societies, while valuing their community or
state’s important documents, also seeking information about and interested in the preservation
18
Ernst Posner, American State Archives (University of Chicago Press, 1964).
See Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United States: a Critical
Assessment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
19
02/12/16
11
and proud presentation of objects, costumes, photographs and buildings.20
In 1904, attendees at the AHA meeting in Chicago whose interests were primarily in
local history organized within the parent organization a “Conference of State and Local
Historical Societies.” Its members, primarily the executives of state historical societies, as well
as archivists, librarians, a few faculty of state university history departments, and local historians
(chiefly from the West and South) met annually in joint sessions with the AHA for more than
thirty years to address common interests in publishing early records, and marking historical
sites.21 By 1940, however, feeling increasingly shut out of professional historical societies
dominated by academic historians, those professionals involved in the more public world of
history work met in New York, withdrew from the AHA and formed their own organization, the
American Association for State and Local History (AASLH.) After trying to persuade the AHA
to do so, AASLH leaders and others created their own, lavishly color illustrated popular history
magazine, American Heritage, as an antidote to what the public perceived as the dry and
argumentative articles in the professional academic historical journals.22 Archivists too broke
away from the parent historical association, creating a separate Society of American Archivists
in 1936. Professionally trained museum staff, mostly graduates of art history museology
programs, found their professional life in the American Association of Museums, created in
On these and other developments in the historical profession related to public history, see
Mooney-Melvin, "Professional Historians and the Challenge of Redefinition," 5-22; Kammen,
ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States; Peter Novick,
That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
20
An overview of the origins and history of AASLH is in Rath et.al, Local History, National
Heritage, published as part of the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the organization's
founding; see also George Rolli Adams, "Planning for the Future, AASLH Takes a Look at its
Past," History News 37 (September 1982), 12-18.
21
Roy Rosenzweig, "Marketing the Past: American Heritage and Popular History in the United
States," in Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., Presenting the Past:
Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1876), 21-49.
22
02/12/16
12
1906.23 The world of history - or of those who practiced it as professionals - was increasingly
fragmented.
Fragmentation remained the reality until the early 1970s. During the 1950s and 1960s
there was a great expansion of the historical profession in the U.S. In the post-WWII years,
established universities grew rapidly, and new universities were founded to meet the demand for
higher education; history departments in almost every major university established or expanded
post-graduate programs, awarding record numbers of MA and PhD degrees. But in 1970 this
expansion suddenly ended. The young men and women of that graduate school generation
suddenly found themselves trained in the skills of how to do history, but with no academic job
prospects in sight. Many dropped out of history work altogether, but some took jobs in
museums, in archives, and in local historical societies managing collections and historical
structures.24 Others found work in the newly invigorated historic preservation movement, given
momentum by new national and state laws encouraging the preservation and protection of
historic structures, neighborhoods and landscapes.25 Still others found work in government
history offices - the State Department, the Department of Agriculture, each of the Armed Forces,
the FBI, the CIA, the National Park Service all had or created historical offices, or created a post
On professional education and professional organizations in related fields such as archives and
museums, see Constance B. Schulz, "Balancing Acts in a Three Ring Circus: Public History
Education Today," The Public Historian, (2000) and "Becoming a Public Historian, " Gardner
and LaPaglia, Public History, 23-42.
23
For a brief discussion of the link between the "academic crisis" and the origins of the public
history movement, see Scardaville, "Looking Backward Toward the Future."
24
For an overview of the Historic Preservation movement in the United States, see Charles B.
Hosmer, Jr., Historic Preservation Comes of Age: from Williamsburg to the National Trust,
1926-1978 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981); William Murtagh, Keeping
Time: The History and Theory of Preservation in America (Pittstown, Pennsylvania, 1988);
"Historic Preservation," in Carol Kammen and Norma Prendergast, eds., Encyclopedia of Local
History (Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press, 2000), 231-242.
25
02/12/16
13
for an historian within their agency.26
To their occasional surprise, many of these would-be college or university teachers
discovered that they were engaged in challenging and interesting research; not only were the
skills they had learned in graduate school equally relevant to this new work, but their jobs
offered opportunities to bring new insight and approaches to interpreting the past to the publics
their institutions served. Often they found themselves working in partnership with people trained
in other disciplines - art historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, folk lore specialists,
librarians and records managers. But even as they came to think of themselves as archivists, or
museum curators, or conservators or preservationists, these men and women also continued to
think of themselves as historians.
Two things happened as a result of this shift in employment patterns for historians. The
first was a growing demand on the part of historians working in public places that they be taken
seriously by their fellow historians in the academy and that the work of research, writing, and
interpretation which they completed in creating a museum exhibition, or nominating a
neighborhood to the National Register of Historic Places, be recognized as legitimate
professional historical work. They sought to be accepted as equals within the professional
historical associations dominated by academic historians during much of the twentieth century.
The second result came from within a few of the universities: if their graduates were finding
satisfying careers outside of the world of the classroom, wouldn't it make sense to begin to
educate them as historians for some of the special skills and knowledge needed in those careers?
Between 1970 and 1975, a handful of academic history departments, including my own at the
University of South Carolina, instituted formal MA or PHD graduate programs to fulfill this
goal. Some called these new degree programs "Public History." Others named it "Applied
Martin Reuss, "Public History in the Federal Government," in Howe and Kemp, Public
History: An Introduction; Jesse H. Stiller, "The Practice of Public History in Federal History
Programs: Ensuring the Future," in Gardner and LaPaglia, Public History: Essays from the Field,
357-370.
26
02/12/16
14
History."27
Twenty years later when the National Council on Public History (NCPH) published a 2nd
edition of Guide to Graduate Programs in Public History, fifty-six academic history
departments in the U.S. and Canada listed themselves as providing graduate or undergraduate
education in some aspect of Public or Applied History.28 In 1975, the faculty at the University of
California at Santa Barbara began a journal that they called The Public Historian to give
historians solving practical and theoretical historical problems in public agencies a scholarly
outlet in which to share their research. The creation of the National Council on Public History in
1980 provided them with a professional association, which soon took over responsibility for the
journal. NCPH now has nearly one thousand individual members in the United States and
Canada, and another 200 institutional members who subscribe for the journal. At the same time
as the founding of NCPH, both the major national professional historical associations, the
American Historical Association, and the Organization of American Historians(OAH), created
permanent committees charged with integrating public historians into the profession and its
leadership, and the OAH and the NCPH have held joint scholarly meetings. Major national
funding initiatives, such as the "Teaching American History" project launched by the U.S.
Department of Education in 2000, have included in their evaluation criteria the requirement that
professional historical partners for project include both academic and public history
institutions.29 As a result of the public history movement, the historical profession in the U.S.
and in Canada as well is becoming both integrated and more diverse.
What then is the connection between the Public History movement just described and
local history either as a community's interest in its own past or as an academic professional focus
27
See Schulz, "Becoming a Public Historian."
Parker Hubbard Cohen, comp., A Guide to Graduate Programs in Public History (Indianapolis,
Indiana: National Council on Public History, 1996).
28
The Teaching American History grant project can be seen at
http://www.edu.ed.gov/offices/OESE/TAH, accessed December 26, 2002.
29
02/12/16
15
on community studies? Simply put, the content of the subject matter with which most public
historians deal is the stuff of local history valued and celebrated by local communities, even as
the interpretive framework within which public historians attempt to place local events, places,
peoples, and community development is the larger historical context studied and shaped by
academic historians. Public historians seek to help their local communities understand that it is
through the particular stories of small places like theirs in America that the large questions about
our national past can be answered. In the best of public history institutions, members of the local
community who make up the institutions' membership and boards of directors, and the
professionally trained staff whom they have employed, make of their local history something
more than "national history writ small.” Carol Kammen, who has written eloquently on the
subject, sees local history as
the study of past events, or of people or groups, in a given geographic area - a
study based on a wide variety of documentary evidence and places in a
comparative context that should be both regional and national. Such study ought
to be accomplished by a historian using methods appropriate to the topic under
consideration, while following general rules of historical inquiry: openmindedness, honesty, accountability, and accuracy. . . . Local history is, at its
heart - as is history itself - the study of the human condition in and through time.30
This definition does not subsume local history to national history. “By definition, a local
historian is interested in the history of a particular area,” notes Kammen, and even a collection of
the histories of many such particular areas does not necessarily combine to produce a history of
the nation. “Rather, the history of a locality has its own rationale, which . . . is touched at
varying points by national events."31 In the United States and in Canada, the role of the public
historian is to understand both the rationale of a particular locality and the significance of
national events which touch it.
It is worth noting that the evolution of Public History in the United States has been quite
Carol Kammen, On Doing Local History: Reflections on What Local Historians Do, Why, and
What it Means (Nashville, TN: AASLH , 1986), 4-5.
30
31
Ibid, 93.
02/12/16
16
different from the intellectual definition of public history in Britain. There, "public history" has
until recently been understood as the arena in which publics - whether as individuals or parts of
communities - construct their own histories. In this definition, public history occurs when a
variety of non-professional publics have an interest in, create, and possess their own histories. In
the 1970s Raphael Samuel founded at Ruskin College, Oxford, a Public History Workshop
movement dedicated to the proposition that “personal, family, community and public history” is
no longer “the perogative of the historians." “Historians,” in this context, are understood to be
“academic historians.” The role of academic historians in this approach to public history is an
intellectual analysis of those publics and their use of their own history, rather than the
participation with public audiences in understanding and interpreting past experiences and
events.32
Public history as it is practiced in the U.S. today attempts to combine the
understanding implicit in the Raphael Samuel approach that ordinary people in the community
value and can contribute to telling their own histories with the professional academic conviction
that all good history must be driven by Kammen's litany of "open-mindedness, honesty,
accountability, and accuracy."
It joins with the practices described in other presentations at this
conference on Local History and Academic History as a model for "bridg[ing] the gap between
academic studies of local history and the recovery and presentation of local history and culture to
the general public."
A useful overview of the approach taken by Samuel can usefully be found throughout his
Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994). For an example of the kinds of studies undertaken
by his students, see the collection of essays by members of participants in the Ruskin College
Public History Workshop edited by Hilda Kean, Paul Martin and Sally J. Morgan, Seeing
History: Public History in Britain Now (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2000).
32