Reflections on Public History and Archives Education

Casual observers might assume that public historians and archivists enjoy a close working relationship. Both fields share a commitment to preserving historical documentation and making history accessible to diverse popular audiences. Practitioners typically work in a broad array of institutions ranging from large federal agencies to small non-profits. They generally endorse such core values as open access to information, respect for personal privacy, ethical approaches to community engagement, and methodological transparency. Public historians and archivists often participate in joint advocacy efforts, attempting to hold public agencies and private institutions accountable by promoting sound recordkeeping practices and solid historical studies. They share similar funding sources, and have benefited from the support of such governmental agencies as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Beneath the surface, however, a clear disciplinary divide has complicated relationships between these two professions. Public historians and archivists attend different professional conferences, read different journals, pursue different degrees, and train in different graduate schools. Their foundational literature contains little overlap. Distinct historical factors have shaped their basic principles and practices. In fact, public history and archives professionals remain peculiarly isolated from each other, as well as from academic historians. A brief consideration of their distinctive histories over the past forty years largely explains the separation, but also points toward collaborative possibilities for the future. Public historians brought a messianic zeal and an expansive vision to their work in the late 1970s, as they began to define their field of study. Though historians always have attempted to engage multiple publics, a group of university-based scholars coalesced roughly forty years ago around a series of theoretical and practical issues in an effort to revolutionize their discipline. In part, their work grew out of the communitybased History Workshop movement associated with the Marxist historians Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, and their colleagues in Britain. It also owed much to the rise of New Left scholars in the United States, who sought to link their work with working-class audiences, racial and ethnic minorities, and the social protesters who were challenging social and academic norms. Public historians at the time enthusiastically embraced new fields including popular culture studies, local and community history, visual literacy, and critical media analysis. They incorporated such seemingly radical methodologies as oral history into their work. They considered museum exhibitions and film to be legitimate methods of scholarly output, equal if not superior to the traditional monograph. Public historians remained committed to producing carefully considered and cutting-edge historical scholarship, but they sought out venues where they could communicate their conclusions in popularly accessible and innovative formats. Perhaps more than anything, they developed the concept that communities and professional academics needed to work together to co-create histories. A sacred concept for these public historians involved the need to “share authority” with