The geological concept ‘the Anthropocene’ circulates widely outside Earth System Science – in museum communities, public culture, social sciences, and amongst social science and humanities scholars, artists, activists and public historians too. It is an evident idea for public historians today working with environmental history to engage with a concept that successfully and popularly bridges academic and public interests. This article discusses the concept of the Anthropocene within public environmental history’s historiography and brings in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential discussions from the academic field of history and theory about the non-synchronous temporalities geological time and historical time. The article categorizes public environmental history’s methodological approaches since the field emerged in the 1990s, revealing the important concepts being landscapes, human-nature interactions, climate change, sustainability and the Anthropocene. It concludes that the Anthropocene is a concept that can further develop public environmental history but that it also a paradox to the field potentially affecting a core idea in public history – relationships to publics. This has to do with temporal implications of the concept: it squeezes the temporality of memory important to public history and humans out of view; it imposes an extremely slow and long chronological time that is unfamiliar if not foreign to ordinary people to perceive of; it carries with it the idea about a future without humans and other species of today.
This article describes popular game titles used in history education in Poland. In the first part, games designed by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) are presented, along with examples of their use and feedback expressed after playing by students. The second part of the article discusses the global bestselling game Twilight Struggle along with a case study of its use with history students. The purpose of the article is to point out the possibilities of gamification of historical education and, above all, to indicate the applications of board games in the academic training of teachers who later create school reality with their work.
Public history is still a relatively unknown term in New Zealand, an island nation in the southwest pacific with a population of around 4.6 million people. Until the late 1980s it was rare for professional historians to practise their profession outside the academy. Most of the few who did were public servants attached to institutions such as the Department of Internal Affairs or the major museums. Expanding work opportunities in the institutional, museum and historic heritage sectors have, however, fostered an increase in the number of freelance historians, some of whom are now participating in the identification, assessment, interpretation and management of New Zealand’s historic places.
Public history is still a relatively unknown term in New Zealand, an island nation in the southwest pacific with a population of around 4.6 million people. Until the late 1980s it was rare for professional historians to practise their profession outside the academy. Most of the few who did were public servants attached to institutions such as the Department of Internal Affairs or the major museums. Expanding work opportunities in the institutional, museum and historic heritage sectors have, however, fostered an increase in the number of freelance historians, some of whom are now participating in the identification, assessment, interpretation and management of New Zealand’s historic places.
This overview article explores the nature of public history on the island of Ireland, discussing current trends in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Family history and digital history are highly popular ways of engaging with the past, both on the island and among the Irish diaspora, who have a voracious appetite for engaging with their heritage. Given that the island contains a postcolonial society (Republic of Ireland) and a post-conflict one (Northern Ireland) attention is given to the ways that these difficult pasts are engaged with by communities, through examining the histories of Mother and Baby Homes, The Troubles, and dark tourism. This article also briefly comments on who is involved in public history. Academic historians are engaged at state and local levels, and are often turned to as experts in the field, but grassroots public history projects which offer participatory ways of doing history are growing. This article emphasizes the high levels of engagement Irish and Northern Irish publics have with their history, however, it also suggests that public history as a radical method of ‘doing history’ is still in its relative infancy.
Proposed in the United States of America in the 1970s, the term “public history” is now used in various parts of the world. The internationalization of the field of public history raises various questions about its definition, its practices, and its theories. Based on sometimes long-established practices, public history reflects new approaches to audiences, collaboration and authority in history production. The article distinguishes and analyses the different phases of internationalization in the 1970s, 1990s, and 2010s and argues for a new international public history. Instead of a spread of public history, the new internationalization lies upon multicultural approaches and understandings of the field. Symbolized by the rise of public history in Italy, the glocal process of defining and practicing public history – where the local practices and theories relate and influence global definitions – provides more nuanced and richer understandings of the field. The new internationalization has concrete consequences on the public history structures, resources, languages, and projects.
Public history has long been practiced in South Africa, yet its content and purpose have always been deeply contested. In a deliberate, state-driven process, it has undergone extensive change since 1994, helping to redefine the nation in the post-apartheid era. There have been two principal means of achieving this goal: the first has been to commission a large number of new memory sites and the second has been to insist on a renovation of older sites, whose previous incarnation served the narrow interests of a small white minority. While clear new narratives have emerged, the process has witnessed continuing contests over representation and competing claims to the heritage estate.
From May 2014 to March 2019 the Imperial War Museums launched a large-scale digital crowdsourcing project, ‘Lives of the First World War’. ‘Lives’ melded official and unofficial datasets to create an integrated database of people who had participated in the First World War. Over the course of the project 7.7 million individual histories were collected. After the initial collection phase, ‘Lives’ became a permanent digital memorial and database. This article investigates how ‘Lives’ contributed to public understandings of the First World War during and after its centenary. While undoubtedly an impressive and difficult undertaking, this article suggests that large scale data collection as a methodology on its own will replicate collection biases, unless married with specific collection drives. In the case of the First World War, this means that global majority narratives are subsumed by white British ones, at the expense of historically realistic data. The skewed datasets that come from large crowdsourced projects have widespread implications for cultural memories of events if they are to be digitally preserved within national collections.
This article argues for a new genre of book making which I call an archival book that is created to present archival material to the public. The book discussed here was published as a commemorative volume in 2010, soon after the centenary of the Indian physicist, Homi Bhabha. The archival book described here attempted to move away from the celebratory coffee table format and focused instead on the archives of the scientist. The article tries to define the key characteristics of the archival book that is meant for the public and not exclusively for a scholarly community and the challenges of presenting archival material in this form. Finally, the article focuses the inter-disciplinary nature of the archival book-making project and the collaborative way in which the writers and designer can work together in order to make the archives accessible, especially in countries where archives remain inaccessible to the general public.
The concept of a ‘national museum’ is fundamentally at odds with the theory and practice of public history, with public historians’ understanding that historical experience often does not obey borders, that the nation is not always the center of human experience and culture. The argument of this essay is that transnational history—history that crosses borders, that challenges the privileging of the nation state—constitutes an opportunity for national museums to go beyond national identity and the confines of geopolitical borders. Human experience is far more complicated than can be captured in the history of a single nation, and national museums are obligated to transcend such a narrative and engage in the contested, transnational nature of history and culture. Museums are well positioned to do this because they deal not only in ideas but in objects, the material culture of times and places that did not so easily sort out into ‘nation’ and ‘other.’ Museums can make the theoretical real, illuminating how national identity has been constructed from the parts of our many cultures, ideas, and institutions, recentering the narrative and recovering the stories obscured by the ascendancy of the national narrative.
This overview article explores the nature of public history on the island of Ireland, discussing current trends in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Family history and digital history are highly popular ways of engaging with the past, both on the island and among the Irish diaspora, who have a voracious appetite for engaging with their heritage. Given that the island contains a postcolonial society (Republic of Ireland) and a post-conflict one (Northern Ireland) attention is given to the ways that these difficult pasts are engaged with by communities, through examining the histories of Mother and Baby Homes, The Troubles, and dark tourism. This article also briefly comments on who is involved in public history. Academic historians are engaged at state and local levels, and are often turned to as experts in the field, but grassroots public history projects which offer participatory ways of doing history are growing. This article emphasizes the high levels of engagement Irish and Northern Irish publics have with their history, however, it also suggests that public history as a radical method of ‘doing history’ is still in its relative infancy.
A diverse and dynamic range of public histories has emerged and rapidly evolved in China during the past two decades. Why do such amateurish, mostly unpaid forms of history possess such a mobilizing effect upon ordinary Chinese people? This article addresses public history in China from the perspective of prosumption, and argues for a new model of historical inquiry from four key respects, i.e., the goal, process, means, and structure. Prosuming history, a fresh social fact, a consciously collective phenomenon, an intricate code system of signs, has initiated a paradigm shift in the field of history in China.
As public historians living and working in Britain, we live in interesting times. The last twelve years have seen political turbulence in the United Kingdom and its four constituent nations of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In this article, we aim to explain why understanding the role of the state in public history in Britain is important. In doing so we consider the current political and public history context, including the rise of non-university based public historians who are working across a range of sectors, as well as the relatively recent rise of taught public history at postgraduate levels within the universities. We do the above in the context of the cultural history wars that have raged in the United Kingdom over the last decade, and the possible links between this and the promotion of wider heritage activities through politically directed funding. We argue that a clear future task for public historians is work aimed at understanding the ways history is being used to shape public perceptions of the past, and how that plays out in the present.
This article charts the peaks and troughs of public history inside and outside academia in Australia and the promise of the establishment of a new network of public historians in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. It reveals the value of Australian creative engagements with the past. It concludes by suggesting that networks and team-based work are vital for the successful practice of public history in Australasia and elsewhere.
Public history is still a relatively unknown term in New Zealand, an island nation in the southwest pacific with a population of around 4.6 million people. Until the late 1980s it was rare for professional historians to practise their profession outside the academy. Most of the few who did were public servants attached to institutions such as the Department of Internal Affairs or the major museums. Expanding work opportunities in the institutional, museum and historic heritage sectors have, however, fostered an increase in the number of freelance historians, some of whom are now participating in the identification, assessment, interpretation and management of New Zealand’s historic places.
The traditional history education in China has been challenged ever since the dawn of the twenty first century. This article argues that public history, as an emergent and reflective practice, constitutes an effective intervention into the traditional history education in three significant ways. These three aspects are learnable, but are not easily teachable through mere cosmetic reform of the current historical curriculum; the real changes should come from outside of the established frame of reference, i.e. history teachers with public history knowledge and skills. With an in-depth analysis of three national public history faculty training programs (2014-2019), the article further suggests that public history provides new direction in teaching the past in China.
