In his latest book, Performing Public History: Case Studies in Historical Storytelling (Routledge, 2025), David Dean argues that bringing the past to life through non-traditional media invites us to re-think how we do history work. In lieu of a traditional book review, IPH offers an edited transcript of an International Federation for Public History Explorer’s event held on April 2, 2026.
Iranians who lost loved ones during the revolutionary period (1979-89) have struggled with trauma for more than 40 years. The pain of loss and the knowledge of the torture that happened in the prisons have haunted Iranians who have unintentionally tried to process their trauma through public history. In this article I explore some of these cases by drawing upon interviews I conducted with family members, using them to provide a theoretical framework that demonstrates how generational experience contributed to the ways families, largely unaware of this historical field, utilize public history for healing purposes. Oppression has forced Iranians to engage with audiences as limited as one's family or as broad as on a global scale. As some Iranians have moved into diaspora, and with the transition of developed trauma into an inherited form, the fear of oppression has decreased generationally, increasing the levels of engagement with the public. This has encouraged Iranians living inside the country to join in such efforts on a larger scale. Whether public, semi-public, or less-than-public, all cases demonstrate how the process of healing has evolved into a form of resistance that strives for engagement while defying the forces that seek to silence them.
This article examines the intersections between memory activism, academia, and public history through the case of the Traveling Museum of Memory and Identity of Montes de Mar & iacute;a, known as El Mochuelo, in the Colombian Caribbean. The museum, a peripatetic and community-driven initiative, travels across 15 municipalities affected by decades of armed conflict, using interactive and largely non-material displays rooted in oral traditions and cultural practices. Drawing on long-term engagement with the project, the article argues that El Mochuelo exemplifies how collaboration among activists, scholars, and local communities can produce meaningful and situated understandings of the past. Rather than treating research and activism as opposing domains, the case demonstrates their productive convergence, highlighting shared ethical and political commitments. Situated within broader debates on memory activism and decolonial museology, the article shows how grassroots initiatives challenge official narratives, foreground marginalized voices, and contribute to processes of symbolic reparation and community rebuilding. By emphasizing creativity, resistance, and interdisciplinarity, El Mochuelo reveals the potential of public history as a flexible and engaged practice that bridges academic inquiry and social justice work, ultimately questioning the possibility of neutrality in contexts marked by violence and historical injustice.
This article describes the design of a locative mobile phone app, Rijeka Fiume in Flux, for exploring the past of Rijeka, a city that was historically contested, first between Hungary and Croatia in the 19th century, and then between Italy and Yugoslavia in the 20th century. It evaluates how successfully it disrupts ethno-national narratives about the city’s identity. Modelled on experiential learning and polyvocality, the app seeks to share historical knowledge from multiple perspectives with a broad audience, while also enabling users to explore the past based on their curiosity and experiences moving through the city, provoking engagement with the multifaceted stories of the city. Focus groups with students of different ages, place of residence, and language groups offers useful insights on the potential of such apps to tell new stories about contested heritage. One category of feedback concerns the appeal as well as drawbacks of technology, including the consequences of encountering technical malfunctions, and larger questions concerning the alienating effects of technology. The second concerns the challenges of attracting and maintaining the interest of the intended audience. The third concerns the effects of engaging with the contents of the app. Overall, the feedback confirms the potential of apps to disrupt and create new narratives, while also highlighting specific challenges that require targeted attention in order to develop effective apps.
The convergence of new and old media technologies invites a renewed focus on orality, and it also makes possible oral history goes public in Asia. In an embodied interview space, orality, affect, and memory interact. Public oral history in Asia is emergent and complex. This article explores that emergence, that complexity. With a selection of case analysis in Asian context, the study argues how public oral history has emerged as an affective engagement with the past, and how that engagement has actively shaped the public memories.
This article explores the conservative turn in India's public history, examining its shift from a pluralistic, regionally grounded tradition to a centralized, ideologically driven narrative under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Since 2014, public history has been increasingly reframed through the lens of Hindutva nationalism, marginalizing minority voices and emphasizing a singular Hindu civilizational past. This "saffronization" is reflected in curriculum reforms, state-sponsored monuments, and the commercialization of heritage. Through examples such as the Ram Mandir, the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, and corporate-sponsored heritage sites, the paper shows how historical memory is being curated to support a narrow ideological project. Despite this, pluralist initiatives persist at the community level, including grassroots archives, urban heritage walks, and NGO-supported preservation efforts. These offer critical counter-narratives and underscore the ongoing contestation over India's past. The paper argues that public history in India has become a terrain of political struggle, where historical representation is deeply entwined with questions of democracy, identity, and power.
History wars in the Philippines over the memories of the Marcos era exploded in the open in the months leading to the 2022 presidential elections. They are evident in the bitter and sustained clashes between the proponents of two opposing narratives, the Dark Age versus the Golden Age. This essay seeks to explore the factors that enabled the development of these sharply opposing narratives and what does such development imply about the character of the contemporary Philippine politics and public consumption of history. It shows that these clashing narratives have evolved alongside the shifting power relations in the country between the Marcoses and their supporters, on the one hand, and the broad coalition of groups that opposed them, on the other. While both narratives are problematic as historical knowledge, they are potent as political tools for their respective proponents and opponents. The shifting grounds of politics in the country fueled ambiguities not only in what counts as history but in who or what constitute the conservative and the progressive in the country's historical narratives.
This paper aims to study the production and circulation of commercial and political uses of the past by the Brazilian extreme right, based on two videos about the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship: one by the Brasil Paralelo Company and one by the YouTuber Felipe Castanhari. It is argued that the narrative elaborated by both videos promotes a conservative public history through a memory politics and what we call the "past on demand." "On demand" because the idea of historical truth is reduced to a choice made by the viewer watching the video on YouTube. We contribute to analyzing memory disputes about the dictatorship in virtual environments, linking content to form.
One of Spain’s best-known public historians is an academic outsider, María Elvira Roca Barea. This article contextualizes and briefly surveys her work, which defends empires in general and the Spanish Empire in particular. Rather than revisit the extensive historiographical debate, it focuses on the ‘public’ aspect of her public history. By examining her extensive digital media profile, it considers the ecology of the groups and media outlets that give her a platform, the social and political currents she endorses or which support her, and the social and political impact of her work. It finds that her imperial apologetics are selective, that Hispanophobia as embodied in the leyenda negra [Black Legend] is her real target, and that she offers a Spanish version of what William McNeill called ‘mythistory.’ It argues that while many of her values are right-wing populist, and while she positions herself as a centrist, she nevertheless appeals to some on the left by positioning Spain as an outsider in a world dominated by ‘Anglo-Saxon’ capitalism. Her call for greater unity within ‘Hispanidad’ [the Hispanic world] gestures towards a deeply contested but truly international public history in the service of geopolitical ends.
This paper uses Cal Horton's theory of Cis-Supremacy to demonstrate the interplay of trans exclusionist histories and contemporary cis power structures. The paper, through this preliminary discussion, dissertates how and why the obfuscation of trans narratives from history impacts the material conditions of trans lives. It demonstrates why cis-supremacist pasts should be seen as deliberate attacks on the trans community. It concludes, from an Applied Transgender Studies positionality, by offering some initial interventions that can be made against cis-supremacist historic narratives.
The aim of this article is to examine the reverberations of the Cristero War in the discourses, symbols, and practices of Mexico's new Christian right as expressed in the social media communications produced and consumed by right-wing leaders and their supporters. Via social media, new Christian right leaders have purposefully used Cristero symbols of piety, martyrdom, sacrificial violence, and religious militancy to appeal to a sector of Mexican society that sees the Cristero War as an unresolved conflict and an ongoing struggle between a Catholic nation and an impious state. While the new Christian right has been unable to advance its agenda via formal or electoral politics, its growing presence on social media and localized grassroot movements, next to its transnational reach (via connections with MAGA leaders in the United States), point to its rising significance in a country that has thus far remain exempt from the ascent of the far right in the Latin American region.
This article examines the construction of conservative public histories in the Andean countries, exploring their continuities and transformations into the 21st century. Rather than viewing history solely as discourse, I approach it as a series of commemorative and communicative practices that project racialized imaginaries publicly. From this perspective, I analyze how conservative public history, linked to Hispanist ideologies, shaped ideas of racial hierarchy both nationally and transatlantically. Particular attention is given to the alleged historical objectivity claimed by neo-Hispanist discourse, its strategic connection to mestizaje as a whitening ideology, the diplomatic use of historical narratives, and contemporary expressions of whiteness through Hispanist rhetoric in media. My aim is to illuminate these critical intersections, opening a broader debate on racialization within the field of public history.
In this article, we examine the phenomenon of 'historical revisionism' (HR), a movement to construct a 'bright' historical narrative of Japan often by denying and minimizing its wrongdoings under Imperial rule, and discuss possible interventions with such narratives through public history. We trace the development of HR, its proponents' identity as 'truth-seekers' and their sentiments, such as victimhood and anti-elitism. We argue that an effective intervention would also require widely building social trust in those professional historians opposing HR by presenting their complex procedure of critical historical research and knowledge so as to 'immunize' potential consumers of HR from historical distortions. In times of political contestation over history due to the democratic nature of interpreting history, we suggest shifting away from the common Japanese debate over whether to share academic historians' 'authority' or risk relativism that enables HR, and moving towards a collaborative approach where diverse participants including academic historians share the commitment to interpretive rigor, thereby countering HR.
The German TV series Babylon Berlin is based on the popular crime novels by Volker Kutscher on Weimar Berlin in the 1920s. In this conversation, the author explains his ambitions to make his readers aware how a democracy can change into a dictatorship. He describes his research methods, discusses the relationship of historical facts and fiction, and talks about differences between his books and the series Babylon Berlin.
Conservative public history in Russia merges state propaganda with contemporary tools of public engagement. It emphasizes themes such as patriotism, military triumphs, and state-centered historical narratives, while restricting opportunities for critical reflection on controversial episodes of the Russian past – such as framing World War II as the Great Patriotic War, Stalinist repression, and the transformations of the 1990s. Key actors include state-supported organizations like the Russian Historical Society and the Russian Military Historical Society, alongside memorial projects, historical parks, and educational initiatives. Bloggers and media outlets also play a prominent role in shaping and disseminating these narratives. This article explores the main features of these practices and actors through the lens of “conservative public history.” Central to this approach are conceptions of a hierarchical structure of historical knowledge and specific constructions of expertise, which are closely tied to political ideas about the state’s pivotal role and the limits of the public sphere. The article also examines how conservative public history appropriates new media and contemporary methods of public engagement to advance its agenda.
This essay introduces four principles of nationalist historical narration by using the narrative strategies of the political parties the Sweden Democrats and the Danish People's Party as examples. These narrative strategies follow the following four principles: 1. Nationalists cannot invent historical narratives solely out of figments of their imaginations. The Sweden Democrats, for example, can use Charles XII as a symbol of national resistance because he existed in real life. 2. Nationalist narratives must resonate, or at least relate, to other traditions of historical narration. This second principle explains why the Danish People's Party, which operates in a context where the defeatist nationalism characterizes the standard Danish view on history, favors the people instead of kings as heroes of old. 3. A nationalist grammar guides nationalist principles for narration, meaning that a nationalist sentiment as a historical driving force is used whenever possible to show the value of national cohesion in the face of the threats posed by multiculturalism. 4. Ideas from previous generations of cultural nationalists can return to contemporary imagination, as is the case when the parties honor earlier generations of nationalists and their deeds in celebrating the nation and its history.
The National Trust, Europe's largest conservation charity, found themselves in the midst of a bitterly unfolding 'culture war' over public histories of slavery, empire and colonialism in Britain following the publication of a report outlining connections between these histories and properties in their care in September 2020. The reaction that followed was largely spearheaded by Britain's right-wing press, an internal pressure group, and several Conservative MPs. The debates focused on the National Trust's perceived purpose (of 'conservation' not 'politics'), that publishing these connections somehow brought 'shame' on great institutions and families, and that doing so was part of a 'woke' and highly politicized agenda. This article introduces this contested moment in the long and dissonant public memory of slavery and empire in Britain and argues that considering alternative forms of interpretation through green heritage and 'Plant Public History' has potential to expand public understandings of these histories and provide 'alternative ways in' to thinking about otherwise marginalized stories.
Reflecting wider national and international political trends and discourses around heritage and identity, an analysis of the controversies regarding the symbolism of the popular and widely-adopted regional flag of the Black Country in the West Midlands of England offer a case study in how the tactics of culture war media and politics have been developed and honed to shut down pluralistic and alternative opinions and interpretations to those fostered by institutional and statutory actors, particularly that reinforce uncritical understandings of legacies of colonialism and racism. The region's experience also highlights how institutional approaches within a neoliberal cultural, economic, and funding landscape must be tempered to avoid inadvertently creating divisive and alienating impacts for the wider community's relationship to, and participation in, our shared public history and cultural life.
This article analyses the risks faced by practices associated with public history owing to the resurgence of the far-right in Spain. It critically examines the historical narratives embedded in specific historical shows and reenactments, which, instead of encouraging a nuanced understanding of the past, tend to reinforce nationalist and identity-driven discourses that are fundamentally ahistorical and have a clear exclusionary potential. Furthermore, the recent rise of the genre of historical fiction and particular forms of "historiographical populism" act as vehicles to disseminate historical interpretations linked to an exclusionary Spanish nationalism, which is largely rooted in the legacy of Francoism.
This article reflects on the historical development and enduring nature of anti-indigenous stigmatization in Colombia from the nineteenth century to contemporary times. It explores how official discourse, legislative measures, and cultural entities – such as the National Museum during the early republican era – upheld dichotomous representations that celebrate pre-Hispanic civilizations while depicting present-day indigenous populations as primitive or violent. From the Regeneration era and the enactment of the 1886 Constitution to the exclusionary rhetoric of President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2002–1,010, this paper demonstrates how discriminatory ideologies have been institutionalized through government action and dominant narratives. These frameworks have sustained structural racism by withholding full political participation from Indigenous peoples and constructing them as obstacles to national advancement. Grounded in public history and decolonial critique, this work advocates for responsible engagement with silenced narratives and redefinitions of Colombian identity that center Indigenous presence and sovereignty.
