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.
