Teaching History in Public

As a Civil War historian starting a new academic appointment, I have had the great good fortune to start work at a university about a half-hour drive from a major national military park. Even better, the Chickamauga-Chattanooga NPS is presently celebrating the sesquicentennial of those battles, and for the next several months will enjoy an unusual amount of attention from the local media and the public at large. Chickamauga, for instance, conducted a weekend-long series of programs aimed at reaching the general public, including ranger-led guided walks, living history programs, lectures, book signings, even a pops symphony concert on the battlefield. Later, local and state history organizations will sponsor symposia, lectures, and other events designed to draw in the public as well as academics and professional historians. This is all great fun. This is also, as several volunteers at these events reminded me over the week, “public history.”

The implication, of course, is that public historians are different, somehow, than teachers of history, or (gasp) members of the academy. This made me feel different and strange, somehow; as a new faculty in a teaching university, I think of myself as a teacher-scholar with a purpose not at all dissimilar from public historians. Some of you may be public historians, and may have very definite opinions about what that means.

In any case, my experiences at Chickamauga inspired me to reflect. How is what we, the academics, the teachers, do every day different than what they, the public historians, do? Are our missions different? Are our end goals or desired outcomes so dissimilar? How about the ways we evaluate success and failure? Or is it just a matter of setting or audience? In short, how is teaching academic history different than practicing public history, and what can we learn from each other?

In doing a little digging, I found that the Public History Resource Center defines public history as “history that is seen, heard, read, and interpreted by a popular audience…. Public history is also history that belongs to the public. By emphasizing the public context of scholarship, public history trains historians to transform their research to reach audiences outside the academy.”

I like this definition quite a bit, but other than reaching an audience “outside the academy”, it seems to me that academic historians and public historians aren’t all that dissimilar. We communicate and collaborate. We work in and with other disciplines. We interpret and analyze. And, as academic historians and teachers, isn’t our duty, after all, to teach? And isn’t public history another form of teaching?

Perhaps it’s a question of relationships. Teachers tend to have prolonged, sustained contact with their students; we meet, we discuss, we learn about each other as we wrestle with big questions and challenging material. We also give exams and assign papers. Public historians, I suspect, do not have the same kinds of chances to establish these kinds of relationships with an ephemeral public, nor do they test their audiences on their retention and comprehension. And so, how do they manage to arrest the attention of weekend visitors in an hour or two? And can I, as a teacher, learn from their wisdom?

I think that teachers of American history can learn a great deal by engaging in public history, and I am willing to experiment with this hypothesis and share my results. I have a couple of opportunities this month, and later, I’ll let you know how they go. If anyone would like to share their own experiences or experiments with public history, I would love to hear them.

3 thoughts on “Teaching History in Public

  1. Great post Drew. I’ve been thinking through similar questions as of late and will be asking my students to assess a work of public history after reading primary sources (more on that later). I’m looking forward to hearing more about how you take advantage of Chickamauga and other local resources!

  2. Thanks for this post, Drew. As someone who is contemplating a life in public history/museums, I’ve thought a lot about this supposed discrepancy between public and academic historians. In speaking to professors, museum professionals, and public history interpreters, I’ve found that much more frequently it is the academic historians who create a divide between their work and those “other” historians. I think you’re distinction between these occupations reifies the position that these two professionals are separate, at odds even. (And, to be honest, this distinction often values the academic over the public as more “rigorous”.) Yet what is different (and which you point out) is the audience and format with which public historians are working. Most public historians I’ve encountered (and I’d include myself in this) are deeply committed to representing current scholarship and complex ideas. We’re not here to dilute what academics do; we’re here to impart it to the public. Not only that, we’re engaged in producing historical scholarship ourselves. With the job market looming in my post-comps brain, I’m finding many examples of jobs that incorporate teaching at a university, curatorial work at a museum or archive, and production of research-based monographs/articles. We shouldn”t separate academic and public history because they thrive on each another; indeed, many of us do both. What we need is more academics engaged in public history and more public historians continuing to stay engaged in academic history. Let’s stop worrying about whether they are separate and start thinking about better ways we can keep them connected.

  3. I must agree with Whitney’s post, particularly that for a very long time “academic” historians looked down upon “public” historians as less informed and/or amateurs. I think we must also make the distinction between academic, public, and “popular” historians. I find popular history very useful at times; I’m showing a portion of the HBO John Adams miniseries to my class tomorrow. As someone who is committed to museum work I of course bring in public history (my class is having a museum curator give a guest lecture next month). The other thing to remember is that public history and museum studies both have a long historiography that includes the rapid professionalization of these fields in the last three to four decades. Most people working at the battlefields of the NPS, the local historical society, and the big city museums these days have a bachelor’s degree, many a graduate degree, in highly specialized fields (history, art history, museum studies, material culture, American studies, conservation science, library science, etc.). In many ways this was a reaction to the disdain of academic historians of the past for the ways in which many public history sites interpreted their stories as watered down versions glorifying and deifying traditional heroes. But for a very long time public historians were reading and using the most current work by academic historians to reframe their presentation of their sites/archives/objects, so these places reflected the work of academic research, but at a lag due to funding, time, and staffing. Now, I would argue, public historians are often at the front of the pack when it comes to reinterpreting and complicating the story, as well as better reaching and teaching history to both Americans and international visitors. As your post shows, academic historians have realized both the usefulness of public history and the valuable input practitioners of public history have to offer within the college classroom. This is one case where an increase in specialization of the field has actually resulted in more commonalities across the discipline. I will be using my own posts to go further into the ways in which public history can be used in the college classroom and I am looking forward to hearing how your own plans work out. (And crossing my fingers the park reopens so that you can use it!)

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