History in Our Everyday Lives

Public History: An Overview

Public history is a way of engaging the past and the present. In “History in Our Everyday Lives: Collective Memory, Historical Writing, and Public History,” the National Seminar I have been participating in since May, 2015, we have examined the ways in which public historians uncover the “layers of history” that exist. We have understood public history in terms of two truths: 1) “public history projects must be accountable to community audiences;” and 2) “projects should not freeze a moment or a place in time, but continue to be part of living surroundings.” ⁵ There are varied forms of public history-- from the architectural preservation highlighted in Dolores’ Hayden’s The Power of Place to the oral histories collected by the Baltimore Neighborhood Project that Linda Shopes documents in her essay “Oral History and Community Involvement.” Museums, public art, historical podcasts and other forms of audio storytelling, and historical walking tours can all function as public history, provided they involve or invite community participation. ⁶

In the National Seminar, we explored the complexity conveyed by public history. The nuances are provided by the public historian’s emphasis on community engagement. That nuance can add a layer of objectivity to a seemingly-subjective genre, but, as my Seminar Leader Mary Lui remarked in one session, “history can feel dry without a human element.” And, like any other constructed narrative, history is also subjective. Historians make conscious choices about which texts to cite, whose stories to illuminate, and how to present them. This can lead to the public history project receiving a greater degree of scrutiny, perhaps such as the critical view author Mabel O. Wilson takes of the National Civil Rights Memorial, than the history project that acts upon instead of with a community.⁷ A part of teaching students about history in this way, then, must be to encourage them to look for the complexities in all histories, not just the ones that involve community voice. By practicing public history, students will change the ways in which they see their environments. They will become a part of them and gain greater analytical skills than they would from simply reciting facts memorized for an exam. That, in itself, is immensely powerful,