The Segmentation of the Field: Academic, Public, and Digital Historians
Comments (0) It is often said that public historians wear many hats—that we are “historians in the middle,” with one foot in academia and the other firmly in the public sphere. The National Council on Public History’s Board of Directors recently defined public history as “a movement, methodology, and approach that promotes the collaborative study and practice of history; its practitioners embrace a mission to make their special insights accessible and useful to the public.”
In class, we got into a rather intense debate about whether it is possible to be an academic and a public historian at the same time or whether the two categories are mutually exclusive. It is true that people tend to be more of one than the other depending on what they spend the most time doing (i.e., writing books and journal articles vs. creating exhibits and historic tours). It is also inevitable that people will be categorized as primarily academic or public historians– basically, these are specialties. However, such pigeonholing should be done cautiously and avoided as much as possible, because in the end we are all historians being trained at the graduate level.
Furthermore, we are all producing history, albeit in different forms and for different audiences. Perhaps if various categories of historians worked together more often, we could reach a broader audience, expand our influence, and better educate those people that read or interact with our work. This is especially true for more academic historians, who think less critically than public historians about how to reach the appropriate audience. This is due in large part to the fact that academic historians are usually more interested in reaching a very small, specific audience, but in many ways they are ignoring large trends in the field. The rise of public and now digital forms of history has changed the field rapidly and in unprecedented ways.
In Sunday’s Washington Post Philip Kennicott wrote article entitled “After an Age of Rage, Museums Have Mastered the Display of Commotional Restraint” in which he discusses the decline of controversy in museums since the culture wars of previous decades. He questions what happened—“Was it a cultural or historic change? Self-censorship or a more subtle shift in what museums were exhibiting? Did audiences grow up, or were they just inured to radical art and provocative historical revision?” Although there are a variety of reasons that likely led to a decline in controversy, one of the major things that Kennicott suggests is that museum staff, including historians, have learned from their past experiences. For example, the Jewish Museum in New York prepared for strong reactions to its exhibit, “Mirroring Evil” by adding “public panels and forums to their schedule” and hiring “an on-site facilitator to organize daily public conversations with museum visitors. They also moved four of the most controversial works to a separate room and put up a warning: ‘Some Holocaust survivors have been disturbed by the works of art shown beyond this point..’ It was, literally, an escape valve, and it was part of a strategy that worked.”
Public historians such as those working at the Jewish Museum have much to teach the profession at large, as do digital historians wading into the uncharted waters of open-source history and new forms of communication and research. By learning from their own experiences, listening to their various audiences, and working collaboratively, these new categories of historians are doing their research and considering all available evidence in an effort to constantly improve the field. If all of this sounds familiar it is because it is what more “academic” historians have traditionally done, demonstrating that ultimately we all simply historians, just with various tools, methods, and audiences. As Edward Ayers concludes in his essay, “The Pasts and Futures of Digital History,” all historians “need to understand the new media [and public history] and its implications as fully as possible, for both defensive and hopeful reasons,” and the best way to react to these new trends in the field is to jump in and work together as historians rather than independently in limited categories of our own creation. Perhaps then, as Ayers suggests, we will be able to seize “the opportunities the medium offers, opportunities to touch the past, present, and future in new ways.”
For more information on the rise of public and digital forms of history and the effects of these trends on the field as a whole, see also: Carl Becker’s AHA presidential address, “Everyman his Own Historian”; “Defining Public History: Is it Possible? Is it Necessary?” by Robert Weible; and “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry” by Katharine T. Miller and Howard S. Corbett.
