New Field, Old Practices: Promises and Challenges of Public History

Abstract

To define and subject to some criticism. Based on – sometimes long-established – public practices, public history reflects new approaches on audiences, collaboration, and authority in history production. This article provides an overview of public history, its various definitions, its historiography, and discusses some of the main criticisms of the field. Public history is compared to a tree of knowledge whose parts (roots, trunk, branches, and leaves) represent the many collaborative and interconnected steps of the field. Defining public history as a systemic process (tree) argues for the need of collaboration between the different actors –trained historians or not– and focuses on the function played within the whole process. The future of international public history will require balancing practice-based approaches with more theoretical discussions on the role of trained historians, the publics, and the various uses of the past.