The field of public history is growing as college and university history departments seek to recruit and retain students by emphasizing how studying the past can sharpen their skills and broaden their career options. But faculty have often sought to increase course offerings without knowing exactly what the teaching and practice of public history entails. Public historians have debated the meanings of public history since the 1970s, but as more students take public history courses and more scholars are tasked with teaching these classes, the lack of pedagogical literature specific to the field has been challenging. This book addresses the need for a practical guide to teaching public history now. In eleven essays by esteemed public historians teaching at colleges and universities across the United States, this volume details class meetings, student interactions, field trips, group projects, grading, and the larger aims of a course. Each essay contains wisdom and experience for how to teach a public history course and why such classes are vital for our students and communities. Contributors include: Thomas Cauvin, Kristen Baldwin Deathridge, Jennifer Dickey, Torren Gatson, Abigail Gautreau, Romeo Guzman, Jim McGrath, Patricia Mooney-Melvin, Lindsey Passenger Wieck, and Rebecca S. Wingo.

This book chronicles a University of Alabama historian’s efforts to engage public history over the course of a decade, highlighting personal and educational experiences inside and outside of the classroom. Each chapter reveals how Sharony Green, her students, and collaborators used various public places and spaces in Alabama, including the University of Alabama and Tuscaloosa, where she teaches, as “labs” to learn more about our shared past. Inspired by her familiar beginnings in a historic community in Miami, Florida, the author, a descendant of people from the American South and the Bahamas, unveils her encounters with the built environment, old documents and objects, motion pictures, music, and all kinds of historical actors. The book shares a variety of projects including exhibits and displays, images, videos, songs, and poetry, that serve as manifestations of her encounters with the places around her and her students. Together, these stories uncover an unexpected journey into public history, offering new ways to think about the field and humanities more generally. Teaching Public History Creatively in Alabama is an enlightening resource to both intentional and unintentional practitioners of public history, including scholars, students, and general readers interested in connecting with the past.

The second edition of Public History: A Textbook of Practice offers an updated guide to the many opportunities and challenges that public history practitioners can encounter in the field. Historians can play a dynamic and essential role in contributing to public understanding of the past, and those who work in historic preservation, in museums and archives, in government agencies, as consultants, as oral historians, or who manage crowdsourcing projects need very specific skills. This book links theory and practice and provides students and practitioners with the tools to do public history in a wide range of settings. This new edition reflects how much the field of public history has changed in the past few years, with public history now being more established and international. New chapters have therefore been added on the definition, history, and international scope of public history, as well as on specific practices and theories such as historical fictions, digital public history, and shared authority. Split into four sections, this textbook provides approaches, methodologies, and tools for historians and other public history practitioners to play a bigger role in public debates and public productions of historical interpretations: Part I focuses on the past, present, and future of public history. Part II explores public history sources, and offers an overview of the creation, collection, management, and preservation of materials (archives, material culture, oral history, or historical sites). Part III deals with the different ways in which public history practitioners can produce historical narratives through different media (including texts, fictions, audio-visual productions, exhibitions, and performances). Part IV discusses the opportunities and challenges that public history practitioners encounter when working with different collaborators. Whether in public history methods courses or as a resource for practicing public historians, this book lays the groundwork for making meaningful connections between historical sources and popular audiences.

How do schools and public history influence each other? Cases studies focusing on school and public history around the world shed light on the intricate relationships between schools, students, teachers, policy makers and public historians. From why Robben Island is not included in South African curriculum to how German schools shape Holocaust memory, the case studies offered in this book sheds light on a current topic.

Is historical knowledge important for education? How can we build a shared historical knowledge with schools, communities, and education professionals? The book responds to these questions by suggesting the public history approach, as applied in education and, more generally, to all professions that are based on human relations. The public history of education refers directly to North American experiences, but at the same time it is part of a process of European cultural acceptance and re-elaboration that has one of its main points of reference in the Italian Public History Association. The objective is not to make history for the general public, but to make public history with all those interested, in a collaborative and participative context, in the quest for meaningful knowledge, directly related to the current and challenging needs of our society.

The Oxford Handbook of Public History introduces the major debates within public history; the methods and sources that comprise a public historian's tool kit; and exemplary examples of practice. It views public history as a dynamic process combining historical research and a wide range of work with and for the public, informed by a conceptual context. The editors acknowledge the imprecision bedeviling attempts to define public history, and use this book as an opportunity to shape the field by taking a deliberately broad view. They include professional historians who work outside the academy in a range of institutions and sites, and those who are politically committed to communicating history to the wide range of audiences. This volume provides the information and inspiration needed by a practitioner to succeed in the wide range of workplaces that characterizes public history today, for university teachers of public history to assist their students, and for working public historians to keep up to date with recent research. This handbook locates public history as a professional practice within an intellectual framework that is increasingly transnational, technological, and democratic. While the nation state remains the primary means of identification, increased mobility and the digital revolution have occasioned a much broader outlook and awareness of the world beyond national borders. It addresses squarely the tech-savvy, media-literate citizens of the world, the"digital natives" of the twenty-first century, in a way that recognizes the revolution in shared authority that has swept museum work, oral history, and much of public history practice. This volume also provides both currently practicing historians and those entering the field a map for understanding the historical landscape of the future: not just to the historiographical debates of the academy but also the boom in commemoration and history outside the academy evident in many countries since the 1990s, which now constitutes the historical culture in each country. Public historians need to understand both contexts, and to negotiate their implications for questions of historical authority and the public historian's work. The boom in popular history is characterized by a significant increase in both making and consuming history in a range of historical activities such as genealogy, family history, and popular collecting; cultural tourism, historic sites, and memorial museums; increased memorialization, both formal and informal, from roadside memorials to state funded shrines and memorial Internet sites; increased publication of historical novels, biographies, and movies and TV series set in the past. Much of this, as well as a vast array of new community cultural projects, has been facilitated by the digital technologies that have increased the accessibility of historical information, the democratization of practice, and the demand for sharing authority.

This handbook provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in digital public history. Individual studies by internationally renowned public historians, digital humanists, and digital historians elucidate central issues in the field and present a critical account of the major public history accomplishments, research activities, and practices with the public and of their digital context. The handbook applies an international and comparative approach, looks at the historical development of the field, focuses on technical background and the use of specific digital media and tools. Furthermore, the handbook analyzes connections with local communities and different publics worldwide when engaging in digital activities with the past, indicating directions for future research, and teaching activities.

An authoritative overview of the developing field of public history reflecting theory and practice around the globe This unique reference guides readers through this relatively new field of historical inquiry, exploring the varieties and forms of public history, its relationship with popular history, and the ways in which the field has evolved internationally over the past thirty years. Comprised of thirty-four essays written by a group of leading international scholars and public history practitioners, the work not only introduces readers to the latest scholarly academic research, but also to the practice and pedagogy of public history. It pays equal attention to the emergence of public history as a distinct field of historical inquiry in North America, the importance of popular history and ‘history from below’ in Europe and European colonial-settler states, and forms of historical consciousness in non-Western countries and peoples. It also provides a timely guide to the state of the discipline, and offers an innovative and unprecedented engagement with methodological and theoretical problems associated with public history. Generously illustrated throughout, The Companion to Public History’s chapters are written from a variety of perspectives by contributors from all continents and from a wide variety of backgrounds, disciplines, and experiences. It is an excellent source for getting readers to think about history in the public realm, and how present day concerns shape the ways in which we engage with and represent the past. Cutting-edge companion volume for a developing area of study Comprises 36 essays by leading authorities on all aspects of public history around the world Reflects different national/regional interpretations of public history Offers some essays in teachable forms: an interview, a roundtable discussion, a document analysis, a photo essay. Covers a full range of public history practice, including museums, archives, memorial sites as well as historical fiction, theatre, re-enactment societies and digital gaming Discusses the continuing challenges presented by history within our broad, collective memory, including museum controversies, repatriation issues, ‘textbook’ wars, and commissions for Truth and Reconciliation The Companion is intended for senior undergraduate students and graduate students in the rapidly growing field of public history and will appeal to those teaching public history or who wish to introduce a public history dimension to their courses.

Public History: A Practical Guide explores history in the public sphere and examines the variety of skills that historians require in the practice of public history. It discusses how through various mediums of interpretation and presentation a range of actors, which include museums, archives, government agencies, community history societies and the media and digital media, make history accessible to a wider audience. It provides the reader with an overview of the wider-world application and communication of history beyond the classroom through core case studies for each sector that include ideas for best practice 'in the field'. This book offers an accessible and engaging synopsis of a topic that has not previously been covered. By focusing on an area of study that has changed substantially in the last decade, Public History: A Practical Guide presents a comprehensive outline of the practice of 'public history', and provides ideas for future methodological approaches as well as a reference point for planning professional development in order to gain future employment in these sectors. In the current economic climate, students need to understand the potential use of history beyond university; this book contains the tools and advice needed for them to get one step ahead in terms of knowledge, skills and experience.

When public history was imported from the United States to China around the turn of the twenty-first century, it was introduced as a sub-field within history, and has developed along that path ever since. Professional historians in China, even some forward-looking ones, see public history as merely presenting a change in the patterns of participation in history-making. This book offers a sharply different view. It contends, essentially, that public history represents more than a research domain within history or within any existing discipline, nor does it fit into any established narratives, but rather, a fundamental change of the entire process of history-making in China. In this process, the public is prosuming history. Public history makes obsolete the old structure for building and acquiring historical knowledge: it challenges the old assumptions, supersedes the rigid academic hierarchy, and stirs the imaginations of the multitudes. With an assemblage of case studies, this work makes a case for a system view of public history making, or public history(ing), and launches a concept, complex public history, i.e. public history(ing) as complex adaptive systems.