David Dean, ed., A Companion to Public History

Abstract

In his introduction to this extensive volume, David Dean writes that “public history deals with the ways in which the past is created and presented in the public arena as history.” (p. 2) Approaches to this kind of work are tremendously diverse. Agreement is difficult in terms of a basic definition of the field as well as on who has the legitimacy to perform that task, what practices and representations count as public history, and where should efforts to produce it be based. Some regard it as a practice, others as a field of knowledge, and others as both. At the heart of the description provided by Dean is the distinction between the past and history, or as Michel-Rolph Trouillot put it in Silencing the Past, the difference between “what happened” and “that which is said to have happened.”1 Among public historians there are diverging approaches to the relationship between these two concepts: some emphasize an overlap while others are interested in the fluidity of the boundary between them. This volume seeks to capture that diversity and Dean fittingly frames the compilation in his opening sentence as “a conversation about history in the public realm, the place of the past in the present, and how present-day concerns shape the ways in which we engage with and represent the past” (p. 1).2 By stating that his objective is to foster a conversation he sets the tone: he offers us a conversation that is open, introducing debates to be expanded upon, and inviting us to join. The scope of the compilation is daunting and this is one of its strengths. Dean tried to capture the diversity of a field he knows well, making room for a very inclusive selection: thirty-four chapters written by authors from eighteen different countries, including well-known names and insightful newcomers, and among them not only historians, but also sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, geographers and archivists. Navigation of the volume is facilitated by the sorting of chapters into seven parts: Identifying Public History, Situating Public History, Doing Public History, Using Public History, Preserving Public History, Performing Public history, and Contesting Public History. The titles beginning with verbs emphasize action as one of the trademarks of the field. As anyone who has been part of a program committee at a public history conference knows, it is not an easy task to organize the wide array of possibilities included under this umbrella. The chapters could have been organized in different ways, but the one chosen by the editor is certainly helpful. As can be expected from a volume so diverse, each reader will inevitably be more interested in certain chapters and find others less appealing. Their quality is also uneven: a few remain merely descriptive while others introduce innovative and critical perspectives. The Companion includes chapters that cover subjects one would expect to be present in a public history discussion: museums, monuments and memorials, digital public history, heritage sites, historical preservation, repatriation, memories of difficult pasts, genealogy, reenactments, graphic novels, and video games, for example. Other chapters introduce less explored instances where people make the past a matter of the present such as the branding of olive oil in Turkey, performances by descendants of African slaves in Rio de Janeiro, comedy scripts of Czech-Jewish survivors of the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto and concentration camp, seeking a Stone Age experience in the German countryside, juxtaposing historical photographs with modern digital ones, and new techniques for participatory storytelling on a bus tour in Montreal. The volume is thus not only informative for the reader seeking to get acquainted with the field but also offers pathbreaking cases and refreshing reflections to more seasoned audiences. Since limitations of space make it impossible to comment on every chapter, I will focus on those I found to be more stimulating. The volume includes several contributions that invite public historians to be bold, and to push the boundaries not only of the field but of history in general. As the introduction of the volume states, the relationship between past and present is at the core of public history. Some of the authors invite us to leave the comfort of writing in the third person and purposely maintaining an antiseptic distance from our object of study or intervention, and to venture instead into unpacking the exciting fluid boundary between past and present. Here, the role of the past in the present cannot be made impersonal or divested of power struggles and difficult questions. This may be uncomfortable, but also holds the promise of fertile soil for exploration. In “Storytelling, Bertolt Brecht, and the Illusions of Disciplinary History,” Steven High makes a case for participatory storytelling projects in which historians break with the illusion that we make history behind a wall