scholarly journals Introduction

2011 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilda Kean
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The Public ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Distinctive Role

This issue of Public History Review discusses aspects of the distinctive role of public historians that goes beyond an approach simply aimed at bringing in people to exhibitions or making historical knowledge ‘accessible’. As James Gardner argued in the last issue of Public History Review, ‘We are often our own worst enemy, failing to share what we do. If we want the public to value what we do, we need to share the process of history’. Opening up the premises underpinning different forms of historical representation can assist in widening the historical process and facilitate a way of understanding and making meaning.

scholarly journals Trust, Risk and Public History: A View from the United States

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 52-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
James B. Gardner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Public History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Risk Averse ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Safe Place ◽  
The Public ◽  
Difference Of Opinion

In the public history and museum communities today there is much difference of opinion over the concept of ‘radical trust,’ which basically argues for us to give up control and trust the public to develop content for our websites and exhibitions and provide direction for our work. Most public historians and curators are happy to share authority with the public, but are we now expected to yield all authority? Are we now taking historian Carl Becker’s well-known phrase ‘everyman his own historian’ and updating it to ‘every person his or her own curator’? What is the role of historical knowledge in a world of opinion? Unfortunately, at the same time that many of us are embracing risk online, in a world we have little control or even influence over, we seem to be stepping back from risk taking in our museums, on our own turf. We’ve become risk averse—afraid to make mistakes, afraid of trying new approaches and tackling the historically controversial or the ambiguous. Rather than the ‘safe place for unsafe ideas’ that Elaine Gurian proposed, we have become no more than safe places for safe ideas. We need to push back on both fronts. Public historians should be thought leaders, not followers—not wait to see what the future holds for us but rather try to shape that future.

scholarly journals Public History in Movement – Present Pasts: the Memory of Slavery in Brazil

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juniele Rabêlo de Almeida ◽  
Larissa Moreira Viana
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public History ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Research Network ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
The Public Sphere

AbstractPresent Pasts: The Memory of Slavery in Brazil is a sound testament to the Brazilian public history movemen.This problematization of the “present pasts of slavery” finds fertile ground in Brazilian public history because of the urgent need to record and analyze representations of this traumatic past, going beyond professional and academic contexts to the public sphere. Public history offers reinvigorating possibilities for mediation between, and intervention in, the past and its publics.The Present Pasts Research Network provides a thought-provoking example of public history’s ability to be sensitive to broad public debate and how the needs, interests, and representations of communities can be addressed through historical representation, interpretation, and active history-making.

scholarly journals ‘deep wounds… left… in hearts and minds’: South African Public History

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Julia C. Wells
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Public History ◽  
African Identity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Academic Communities ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
To Come ◽  
Oral History Interview ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Public history practise in South Africa holds out much promise of further things to come. It can close the gulf between history and heritage. This chapter argues that the role of the public historian should not be conflated with the dynamics of the heritage sector, but suggests how trained academics can indeed put their skills to work in a society that is passionately interested in understanding itself and how its pasts created the present. The student movement sharply raised the image of universities in crisis, requiring a whole new, relevant curriculum and rethinking the ways that universities relate to their publics. Public historians can work towards creating invented spaces for co-production of knowledge, moving beyond the traditional oral history interview. The divide between academia and communities is huge and needs to be constantly tackled, providing access to the secluded information of the professional world. I suggest that due to their privileged place in society, many historians have been unable or unwilling to engage with the recovery agenda – the massive need for affirmation of African identity, capacity and culture. A handful of dedicated public historians do not fit this mould and have been exemplary in rolling up their sleeves and boldly engaging with the messy complications of dealing with non-academic communities to produce new forms of historical knowledge, based on inclusiveness.

scholarly journals Managing Nigeria’s development through the public budget: Lessons from the foundations laid by Okotie-Eboh, 1958–1965

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adetunji Ogunyemi
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Public History ◽  
Federal Budget ◽  
Public Budget ◽  
The Public ◽  
Finance Minister ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual

This article examines the essential issues in the economic development of Nigeria in the 1960s as shown in all the budget speeches presented to the parliament by her first indigenous Finance Minister, Festus Okotie-Eboh. The study highlights the Minister’s efforts to obtain parliamentary approval for the Appropriation Bills laid by his government before the Nigerian House of Representatives in Lagos. The purpose being to underscore the role of the individual in shaping the course of the development of any nation. Hence, the study identifies the fiscal policy orientation upon which the key programmes and projects reflected in such speeches were built. It also establishes the extent to which the projects were achieved. The study concludes that Chief Okotie-Eboh’s parliamentary speeches on Nigeria’s federal budget, though loaded with oversized literary niceties, were still, rather than depictive of a mere display of endless parliamentary filibustering, indeed, a veritable part of the sources of Nigeria’s public history.

scholarly journals Public History of Education: riflessioni, testimonianze, esperienze

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Informal Education ◽  
Public History ◽  
Research Work ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The Public ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Approach

This volume represents the founding act of a proposal for training, didactic, study and research work which aims at enhancing historical knowledge in the field of education and educational professionalism. The contributions intend to highlight the identity and usefulness of history and, in particular, of the history of education, not only for every education level, but for the life of local communities itself. At the same time, the authors aim at suggesting a desirable development of the history of education by adopting a Public History approach. This way, academic knowledge can actually be brought into contact with educational contexts, much more so than it has been done so far, in order to respond, together with other disciplines, to the emerging social needs. The Public History of Education, intended this way, can create new profitable relationships between formal and informal education, between the past and present of educators and teachers, between the world of research, cultural institutes (above all, museums) and society.

scholarly journals Openness and privacy in born-digital archives: reflecting the role of AI development

AI & Society ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angeliki Tzouganatou
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Digital Archives ◽  
Audience Engagement ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Core ◽  
Technological Means ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Digital Assets

AbstractGalleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) are striving to retain audience attention to issues related to cultural heritage, by implementing various novel opportunities for audience engagement through technological means online. Although born-digital assets for cultural heritage may have inundated the Internet in some areas, most of the time they are stored in “digital warehouses,” and the questions of the digital ecosystem’s sustainability, meaningful public participation and creative reuse of data still remain. Emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), are used to bring born-digital archives to light, aiming to enhance the public’s engagement and participation. At the core of this debate lies both the openness of data and issues of privacy. How open to the public should born-digital archives be? Should everything be open and available online, and what does it take to achieve balance between openness and privacy, especially through AI initiatives? The study is qualitative and builds on the rationale of grounded theory. The role of AI development is critically investigated in relation to opening up born-digital archives online, by considering privacy and ethics issues. Grounded in the context of the author’s PhD research, the paper proposes a human-centred approach to AI development for democratising its development towards fairness and social inclusion, contrary to the stereotypical cliché of blackboxing, allowing space for the plurality of born-digital archives to flourish.

Popularization and Consilience

2021 ◽  
pp. 212-232
Author(s):  
Matt Grossmann
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Public ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Potential Benefits ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Public Concerns

Social science makes its way into public debate, raising concerns about publicity-seeking scholarship but also opening up potential benefits for engagement across disciplines and society. Social science debates are no longer, if they ever were, confined to universities and obscure journals; they are now central parts of popular media and political debate. Associated scholarly motivations for public influence drive research, then popular discussion of research findings feeds back into scholarship. The increasing role of media attention, popular nonfiction, and think tanks changes the incentives and the practices of social scientists. Popularized scholarship not only (mis)informs the public and policymakers, but also shapes interdisciplinary debates. This enables integration by concentrating diverse minds on public concerns. Sociobiology shows that scholars with very different views of human nature have put forward popular accounts, responded to one another, and created an ongoing space for advancing knowledge.

The American Family and the Little Red Schoolhouse: Historians, Class, and the Problem of Curricular Diversity

Prospects ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 25-74
Author(s):  
Nora Faires ◽  
John J. Bukowczyk ◽  
Bruce Harkness
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
The Public ◽  
Total War ◽  
Education For Democracy ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Though the development of “public history” as a professional practice and its arrival as an academic field date back only to the mid-1970s, an emphasis on the role of historians as public actors with unique societal responsibilities has punctuated the self-reflective literature issuing forth from the profession throughout much of the 20th Century. In his 1949 presidential address to the American Historical Association (AHA), Conyers Read advised that “history has to justify itself in social terms.” In a postwar world whose grand drama shifted from the defeat of fascism to the crusade against communism, Read instructed historians in their highest role, namely, “education for democracy.” “Total war, whether it be hot or cold,” Read observed, “enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part.” Read's prescription has remained a canon in the profession. In 1986, for example, AHA former president C. Vann Woodward owned that historians have “obligations to the present.” Recognizing the problematical nature of the “relationship of history to the public realm,” AHA president William E. Leuchtenburg in like manner nonetheless recently observed that “generation after generation, a substantial corps of scholars has insisted that historians should concentrate on contributing to the solution of contemporary problems.”

scholarly journals THE CONCEPT OF TIME IN THE CONTEXT OF THE DIVERSITY OF HISTORICAL PROCESS

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 21-25
Author(s):  
Yulia Poletaeva
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
History Taking ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The Individual

It is argued that the concept of time determines the problematization of the historical process. The basis for such a formulation of the question is the purposeful human activity inextricably linked with the concept of time. The foundation for the solution of this issue was laid by M. Heidegger, who considers time as a possible horizon for questioning about being. History in this sense, being the task of the spirit or itself, becomes the sphere of human existence. The concept of linearity of time is associated with the finalist understanding of history. The problem of history, taking into account the concept of time, is solved through a fundamentally new interpretation of the role of a single, individual in the methodology of historical knowledge. It is stated that the methodological solution to the problem of history is to consider the concept of the individual (diverse) in history in the context of time.

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