galleyKEAN
Public History Review
Vol 18 (2011): 1–11
© UTSePress and the author
1
Introduction
HILDA KEAN
I think that a pro historian might cloud the issues by
having their own strong points of view. I prefer the
simplistic way of researching one’s own interests and
helping others with similar aims.1
his quote from a member of an internet local history discussion
group focused on Warrington in the north of England may be
depressing reading for public historians interested in exploring
different ways of interacting with people, to create, as Grele has
famously put it, ‘shared authority’. The instigator of this particular
debate on the website was a post-graduate student of public history. He
found to his chagrin that his previously accepted status within the
group, as a resident of Warrington interested in the past, was not
T
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enhanced but instead undermined by his academic historiographical
knowledge.
Jorma Kalela has recently confronted this dilemma of the
relationship between a professional historian and those who make
history for their own interest in his new book, Making History.2
Describing his work with the Finnish Paperiliitto trade union in the
1980s, he created 40 research circles of 200 workers engaged actively
with the past in which they defined their own parameters for the making
of history:
Once they had accepted the idea that they had the same
right to define the substance of history as a professional
historian, the circles proliferated. This agitation was the
hard way in which I discovered that the traditional
academic concept of history that I had taken for granted
was, by its nature, patronizing… They had to have the
right to study what in their view was their own history,
rather than take for granted a ready-made concept of it.3
Such engagement relies on both experience and personal interest in the
subject matter. People need to have ‘affinity with the topics debated’, as
Ludmilla Jordanova has put it, rather than simply acting as ‘audiences
for the discussions of others’.4 Certainly engaging people other than as
mere audiences has been a focus of discussion for many public historians
including those working in Britain, where public funding invariably
raises ‘inclusion’ as a criteria. State strategies for incorporationism are
flourishing.
Laurajane Smith, Paul Shackel and Gary Campbell have criticised
the tendency in the heritage field, particularly in Britain, for practitioners
to adopt cultural policies of ‘social inclusion’ of marginalised groups,
often defined in terms of class and ethnicity. ‘All too often’, they note,
‘these initiatives, though superficially worthy, if overly earnest, do not
work to democratise heritage. Rather they work in an assimilationist
fashion, where members of marginalised groups are urged to emulate
the form of cultural consumption of the middle classes’.5 In similar vein
drawing on her own experience of working on slavery and racism in the
former slaving town of Bristol, Madge Dresser has commented that ‘true
public accessibility also involves the cultivation of trusting, organic
relationships… This can be a time-consuming process needing
imaginative and sensitive approaches. It is not always assessable by the
reductionist tick-box methods so often favored by officialdom’.6
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CRITICISMS OF CURRENT PRACTICE
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’. Emily Duthie, for example, critically engages with the
current projects of the British Museum, which include creating new
audiences through imaginative trails and exhibitions, not least, the
current offer curated by Turner prizewinner Grayson Perry. She notes
the imperialist origins of the institution and the way in which the
removal of objects from a ‘colonial periphery’ to an imperial centre
changed the ways in which they were interpreted. She analyses the way
in which Neil McGregor, the latest director, has tried to overturn the
perception of the museum as the quintessential imperial institution that
looted the world and acquired the trophies of global power for the
glorification of Britain. Nevertheless it has fiercely rejected attempts at
returning such looted goods, most famously the so-called Elgin marbles,
to their countries of origin. Far from moving forward in a post-imperial
world the museum has, she argues, re-enacted the attitudes and ethics of
its imperial founders.
Rob Baum, too, looks critically at museums, specifically two United
States Holocaust museums. Her focus is first on the Los Angeles
Museum of Tolerance and its intended impact upon the visitor and the
creation of ‘experience’ based on techniques ‘lifted from Stanislavski,
Meyerhold and meta-theatre’. She analyses the way in which the
museums are seeking to engage an audience and to create a particular
emotional outcome. The forms of presentation do, apparently, engage,
particularly in the form of computer screens, resembling a video arcade.
But as Baum asks the reader, ‘What do [children] learn from having this
power to manipulate imagery on their consoles – rejecting parts of
history they find boring or too remote, looking for action and reveling in
violent death?’ Turning to the Washington Holocaust museum her
emphasis is upon its ‘self-conscious Americanization’ impressing the
visitor with an order and aesthetic that is specifically American. Thus,
she argues, the Holocaust is presented as a ‘foreign evil, and liberation of
the camps as an event for which Americans took physical and moral
responsibility’. Critical of museums’ emphasis on entertainment she
critically engages with what it means to provide ‘an experience of the
past.’ This contrasts with what she sees as a worthier mandate, the
provision of ‘an observable past, elucidated by those who know more
about it than those who visit.’
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Underpinning both these articles are implicit criticisms of the role of
some public historians or curators. Certainly their intentions are not
usually made explicit in museum displays. A honourable exception is
the recent ‘War horse: fact or fiction?’ temporary exhibition in the
National Army Museum in London. This arises from then highly
successful play based on the novel by Michael Murpungo, staged by the
National Theatre (and now turned into a film by Steven Spielberg). An
explicit feature of the exhibition is an emphasis on remembrance and
collective memory. Near the end of the exhibition is a large horizontal
display cabinet in the centre of the room consisting of rows and rows of
small white outline horses with two named from the play. The
accompanying text states: ‘You have learnt about a lot of named horses
in the exhibition, horses like Joey. Many of them were not as lucky as
him. Help us to remember these forgotten heroes by naming them and
decorating a paper horse and putting it on the Remembrance wall’. The
wall already contains such testimony. One of the final panels defines
remembrance as a feature of collective memory thus being explicit about
the rationale of this part of the exhibition.7
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’.8 Opening up the premises underpinning exhibitions (or books)
can assist in widening the historical process and, as Gardner has
described it, facilitating a way of understanding and making meaning.
With conventional history this rarely happens. Distinguished British
historian and former pro-vice chancellor of the University of Oxford, Sir
Keith Thomas, recently wittily described his ‘technique’ in the London
Review of Books:
It never helps historians to say too much about their
working methods. For just as the conjuror’s magic
disappears if the audience knows how the trick is done,
so the credibility of scholars can be sharply diminished if
readers learn everything about how exactly their books
came to be written. Only too often, such revelations
dispel the impression of fluent, confident omniscience;
instead they suggest that histories are concocted by
error-prone human beings who patch together the results
of incomplete research in order to construct an account
whose rhetorical power will, they hope, compensate for
gaps in the argument and deficiencies in the evidence.
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Perhaps that is why few historians tell us how they set
about their task…9
In different vein, but responding to the same problem, Kalela has
lamented, ‘That the historian selects his or her audience has been
tragically covered up: it is an issue disregarded by the profession even
though every historian is confronted with it… As regards the research
questions asked, a universal single audience remains an undisclosed
premise.’10
P R O C E S S E S O F E N G A G E M E N T
Certainly those who define themselves as imaginative public historians
have attempted both to explain the historiographical process and to
make it as open as possible.11 Alan Rice, for example, has done much to
bring into the public spaces of the twenty-first century Britain’s slaving
past. This includes the creation of a public memorial ‘Captured Africans’
in Lancaster, at one time the fourth largest slave trading port in Britain,
and co-curating the exhibition ‘Trade and Empire: Remembering
Slavery’ in Manchester. As Rice realises, history is not about a past that is
finished, settled or gone but a process by which the past is brought into
the present. Significantly, as Rice demonstrates in his own practice and
analysis, the engagement in different ways with people other than
professional historians including artists, teachers and activists as creators
of meaning will influence significantly the type of history being
developed.
In an attempt to challenge the ‘morbidity of heritage’12 the
Manchester exhibition explicitly included the very debates the curators
had had about the objects they should display. The discussion of this
process was particularly illuminating over the inclusion of four doll-like
models of slaves created by the Samuel family to apparently mark the
freeing of their slaves. While the figures were individualised and dressed
imaginatively they were also crude caricatured images. There was
discussion whether the cost of even conserving such models was
justified and it was realised that ‘the very unveiling of such troubling
objects could prove problematic for many visitors’. Eventually the
objects were displayed alongside labels showing the discussion amongst
the co-curators that revealed that even they did not agree on a reading of
the dolls. In addition visitors were invited to add their comments, which
included those criticising the curators’ critical stance by arguing that the
dolls were not intended to be racist.13 Such an exchange is rare
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particularly when curators are fearful of being seen to permit potentially
racist comments.
The Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project (STAMP) involved
community activists, creative workers, councillors and academics with
Rice as the project’s academic advisor. This Lancaster-based project
obtained funding to engage with schools and community groups and to
create a memorial that would adequately represent generations to come
as well as the past and the present: a ‘memorial that converses memory
without being conservative’. The result was ‘Captured Africans’ by
Kevin Dalton- Johnson erected on Lancaster’s quay.14 This was not a
project in which the ‘expert’ told the ‘people’ the facts of a moment of
history and corrected any perceived misunderstandings. Rather, it was
an exemplary public history project in which, as Michael Frisch has
described it, there was ‘a broadly distributed authority for making new
sense of the past in the present’.15
The project achieved new ways of thinking about the past and
bringing it into the present not by the scholarship of an individual
historian but by all those involved in the project ‘reaching in to discover
the humanity they share’.16 Rice’s role within the project inevitably drew
on his scholarship but this was not separated from his political
commitment to facilitating broad understandings of the past, and his
belief that there are many pasts that should be remembered.
MATERIALS FOR THE CREATION OF HISTORIES
Inevitably, as Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton have recently reminded
us, there are different perceptions of what it means to be a public
historian. The metaphor of a house with many rooms to categorise
‘history’ was one they usefully adopted in their new book History at the
Crossroads. As they noted, ‘Different groups inhabit various quarters…
Some of these people inhabit more than one room while many make
occasional visits to other parts of the house… Many from the academy
insist that they are in possession of the house. But several of the residents
are a little restless’.17
Such restlessness might include challenging the historian’s
conventional focus on archival ‘sources’ and looking imaginatively at
different materials to make the ordinary extraordinary.
Mandi O’Neill takes as a starting point the role of archives, the
mainstay of any historian – irrespective of the ‘room’ into which we
place ourselves. In a previous issue of Public History Review Joanna
Sassoon drew our attention to the constructed nature of archives.18
O’Neill develops Sassoon’s work in a case study that considers the
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implications of gate-keeping with reference to two community archives
in Wales, that of The Butetown History and Arts Centre (BHAC) which
has recorded oral interviews with women from the Cardiff community
of Butetown (‘Tiger Bay’), and Archif Menywod Cymru/Women’s
Archive of Wales (WAW) working to ‘rescue’ sources of women’s
history across Wales. Butetown has been seen as an important site of
debates on the nature of multicultural Britain with the mixed heritage
community based on relationships between Asian, Caribbean and
African sailors and Welsh women dating back many decades. The very
‘popularity’ of this community has created a number of questions.
While interviews with the local people have been conducted, access
to them is denied since the intentions of researchers may be deemed to
be different to those of the original interviewers. What started as a
community project has over time shifted to a more conventional arts and
culture project with the original relationship between the community
and ‘facilitators’ shifting in the process. As O’Neill argues since the
project is more concerned with the ways in which people from the
community can represent themselves now it means that the recorded
voices of earlier generations are rarely heard. In turn, she suggests, the
stereotyping and negative representations of these women remain
unchallenged. In different vein the WAW has used its road shows in
which women brought along their own ephemera to intervene in locally
held official archives to create awareness of different women’s histories.
Others have seen a role for public historians in drawing attention to
the wide range of material existing outside archives. Dwight Pitcaithley
has recently described the way in which he became a public historian of
the United States National Parks Service. One of his first assignments
was analysing the remains of machines for processing bat guano in a
cave with a 180-foot vertical drop into which he was obliged to drop. It
forced him to ‘recognise that historians could find research material
almost anywhere’.19 In similar vein in this volume Andrew Hassam asks
us to recognise the value of thinking about Indian jute as a new starting
point for histories. He is not concerned as such with what was contained
in sacks made of the material – which is often noted – but rather what is
not seen, the containers of such goods. The absence of such items in
public collections should be rectified, he argues, for jute sacks
substantiate the lived experience of those who worked with them, and
illustrate collectivities, like socio-economic class, or race or gender that
extend beyond the immediate locale. He notes that community–based
museums are more likely to contain examples of the quotidian, of what
is important locally to the people who donate.20 However, the inclusion
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of such material is not to reflect back to people what they already know
about their own experience but rather it has the capacity to change and
destabilise established histories.
Alexander Trapeznik also considers material in the landscape
originating from the industrial past of New Zealand for the creation of
histories in the present. As David Atkinson has previously observed in
discussing what he calls ‘mundane places’ numbers of people both see
‘more history all around them, while also seeing more of their histories
too’.21 While recent work has tended to focus on the non-industrial
landscape of New Zealand,22 Trapeznik considers rather more neglected
places, such as those on the Dunedin waterfront. By drawing attention to
industrial and mercantile buildings he stresses the importance of the
legacy of structures resulting from colonial developments in areas such
as agriculture, mining, shipping, railways and processing industries. The
traces of industrial and mercantile practices in the physical landscape
demonstrate, he argues, the interconnectedness and development of
commercial enterprises for at least a century from the 1870s. In such
buildings the past in brought into the present in physical ways, time
being crossed in one space.23 Such buildings provide us with
opportunities to challenge the notion of the repository of history being in
the archive or the curated museum exhibition. As Trapeznik concludes,
the Dunedin waterfront precinct is a cultural landscape that both reflects
social institutions and relations, and has helped shape social relations.
MOVING BEYOND THE PARAMETERS OF ‘HISTORY’
Many innovative pubic historians have turned their attention to the
plethora of forms in which the past is presented. This trajectory was well
covered at the international public history colloquia held at UTS towards
the end of 2010 including discussion on various uses of multimedia and
the internet.24 Often starting points for the creation of imaginative
analysis of the past originate outside the ‘house of history’ constructed
by Ashton and Hamilton. Novelists such as Kate Grenville or Sarah
Waters in their respective fiction25 or artists such as Jeremy Deller,
Christine McCauley26 or Jane Palm-Gold have in recent years done much
to address the importance of the past in illuminating ways. Jane Palm-
Gold for example produced an engaging exhibition in London earlier
this year originating from the scenes she observed outside her flat in
central London, opposite the site of the nineteenth-century Rookery.
Later working with archaeologist Sian Anthony she both brought to light
traces of the cellars and underground passages that helped facilitate easy
egress for criminals of an earlier age as well as using Hogarth’s images of
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the locality superimposed on her own work to create different narratives
of the area.27
In analysing a joint historian-artist project centred on Cannon Hall in
the West Riding of Yorkshire, Martin Bashforth and Patricia Bashforth
argue that inter-disciplinarity and collaboration between historians and
experts in others fields such as art open possibilities for moving away
from over-interpreted mediation. Here they discuss the ways in which
artist–historian engagement can lead to the creation of space to bring
imagination into play. In explaining their own reaction to being reduced
to tears by particular works in the house they say, unconvincingly,
‘Perhaps historians with this level of vulnerability should not be let near
historical documents?’ Yet, as they realise, the opening up of
vulnerability leads to different understandings. Processes common to
historians were destabilised by working with the artistic element leading
in turn to new ways of thinking.
Paul Martin takes such discussion further. Starting from the
assumption that public history can be understood as a field of
contestation he argues that one role of a public historian is to
problematise, to find fault with or to note omission in a dominant or
received narrative and take issue with it. His article focuses on unofficial
popular music compilations on CD-R of 1960s music. He too is a
participant in this practice. In similar vein, the Pew Centre for Arts and
Heritage in Philadelphia has published a substantial volume entitled
Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World. In the
Introduction, the editors argue that:
The traditional expertise of the history museum seems to
be challenged at every turn. Web 2.0 invites ordinary
people to become their own archivists, curators, historians,
and designers as they organize images on Snapfish,
identify artifacts through Flickr, post text on wikis, and
create websites with WordPress and Weebly. Bricks-and
mortar museums, meanwhile, in pursuit of “civic
engagement,” give community members more say in what
stories the museum showcases and how they get told.
Exhibitions frequently shun the authoritative voice.28
Paul Martin reflects on a survey he conducted with various online
practitioners, analysing the responses of those who engage in such
compilations. He sees this both as an exchange of ideas and the
construction of social knowledge. While acknowledging that the
participants themselves would not define themselves as public
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historians, or indeed historians of any sort, he nevertheless states that a
historical, archaeological and taxonomic mindset is clearly discernable in
the responses. For him, then, his role as a public historian can be to offer
another way of seeing and questioning the gate-keeping role of historical
authority. It is also about identifying everyday ‘moments’, where the
impact of change is shown to be experienced.
Such discussions on the very practice of history and the varied
activities of practitioners are a far cry from an approach to history that
sees a monograph as a normative output. In a recent odd article in The
(British) Royal Historical Society Newsletter Ian Mortimer wrote a
contribution suggesting, as if this was an earth-shattering revelation,
‘that it might be possible to arrest the decline of the academic
monograph by encouraging scholars to write for a wider audience’.29 The
proposition as such is sound. But the idea is hardly unusual or new. In
different vein in a recent discussion on H-net public history there was
coverage of the New York Historical Society’s latest exhibit, Revolution!
The Atlantic World Reborn. As one contributor put it, ‘I want to say we
need a law that keeps historians away from history exhibits. I say this
only half in jest.’30
Initiatives such as the colloquia organised in September 2010 by the
Australian Centre for Public History at UTS or the material analysed in
this latest issue of Public History Review indicate, however, that there is
much imaginative practice internationally in the field. It also suggests
that there is indeed a role for public historians today.
I started with a perhaps troubling quote from one the Warrington
internet historians. I finish with another of the group suggesting a more
positive way of thinking about the role of all of us who engage in
historical practice:
History you learn is mainly wrong due to any number of
reasons, but your own is gathered by your own
experience and is partly right. That is why I enjoy the
history on here because we share our experience and that
gives us a greater knowledge for the truth.31
Endnotes
Thanks to Paul Ashton for his helpful comments on this Introduction. Also thanks to Graham
Brinksman for permission to quote from his unpublished research.
1 David H. as quoted in Graham Brinksman, ‘Internet Social Networking: And the Role it Plays
in Public History’, unpublished MA in Public History portfolio, Ruskin College, Oxford,
portfolio, 2011.
2 Jorma Kalela, Making History, Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke, 2011.
3 Kalela, Making History, pp55; 63.
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4 Ludmilla Jordanova as cited in Holger Hoock Introduction, The Public Historian, vol 32, no 3,
August 2010, p18.
5 Laurajane Smith, Paul A. Shackel and Gary Campbell, Introduction, Class Still Matters:
Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes, Routledge, London, 2011, p13.
6 Madge Dresser, ‘Politics, Populism, and Professionalism: Reflections on the Role of the
Academic Historian in the Production of Public History’, The Public Historian, vol 32, no 3,
August 2010, pp62-3.
7 For a fuller discussion of the exhibition see Hilda Kean, ‘Challenges for historians writing
animal-human history: What is really enough?’, Anthrozoos, forthcoming 2012.
8 James B. Gardner, ‘Trust, Risk and Public History: A View from the United States’, Public
History Review, vol 17, 2010, p54.
9 Keith Thomas, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, 10 June 2010, p36.
10 Kalela, Making History, p52.
11 See for example the recent collection of Mark Leone, Critical Historical Archaeology, Left Coast
Press, Walnut Creek, 2010.
12 Alan Rice, Creating Memorials Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic,
Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2010, p45.
13 Rice, Creating Memorials, p69.
14 Rice, Creating Memorials, p48. See also, Hilda Kean, ‘Personal and Public Histories: Issues in
the Presentation of the Past’, in Brian Graham and Peter Howard (eds), The Ashgate Research
Companion to Heritage and Identity, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2008.
15 Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History,
University of New York Press, New York, 1990, pxiii.
16 David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life, University of
Massachusetts Press, 2001, p210.
17 Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, History at the Crossroads: Australians and the Past, Halstead
Press, Sydney, p8.
18 Joanna Sassoon, ‘Phantoms of Remembrance: Libraries and Archives as “The Collective
Memory”’, Public History Review, vol 10, 2003, pp40-60.
19 Dwight T. Pitcaithley, ‘Taking the Long Way from Euterpe to Clio’, in James M. Banner and
John R.Gillis (eds), Becoming Historians, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009, p61.
20 I certainly found the Gundagai museum of interest when I visited a few years ago and viewed
specimens of barbed wire found in different Australian states. (‘Public history and two
Australian dogs: Islay & the dog on the tucker box’, Australian Cultural History, vol 24, 2006,
pp135-62.
21 David Atkinson, ‘The Heritage of Mundane Places’ in Graham and Howard, The Ashgate
Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, p381.
22 See, for example, Sally Morgan, ‘“To fill this Void Land”: Acclimatisation as Mnemonic
Device in Victorian New Zealand’, in Memory Connection, vol 1, no 1, December 2011, pp99-
113; Contained Memory http://www.memoryconnection.org/; eds Kynan Gentry and Gavin
McLean (eds), Heartlands: New Zealand historians write about places where history happened,
Penguin, Auckland, 2006.
23 See Doreen Massey, ‘Places and their Pasts’, History Workshop Journal, vol 39, 1995, pp182-92.
24 Contributions included those on the work of the New South Wales Migration Heritage Centre
(John Petersen), Visualising the past in Three D (Peter Read), opportunities with web 2.0
(Tikka Wilson) or the online multimedia Sydney city biography (Lisa Murray).
25 See for example, Kate Grenville, The Secret River, 2005, The Lieutenant, 2008; Sarah Waters, The
Night Watch, 2006, The Little Stranger, 2009.
26 See for example, Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, a re-enactment of the miners’ strike of
1984-5, Folk Archive, an investigation of folk /popular/vernacular art
; Christine McCauley, Bedtime Stories, Timeline
http://www.christinemccauley.co.uk/>.
27 ‘London’s Underworld Unearthed: The Secret Life of the Rookery’, Coningsby Gallery,
London, May 2011. She discussed her work at the Public History Discussion Group at the
Bishopsgate Institute in November 2011, http://janepalmgold.com/>.
28 Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene and Laura Koloski (eds), Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in
a User-Generated World, The Pew Centre for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia, 2011, p11.
29 Ian Mortimer ‘New vessels for New History’, Newsletter, Royal Historical Society, 5 May 2010,
pp4-5.
30 Consider This: Response to Alan Singer, Darlene Roth, PhD, 14
December 2011.
31 Kenny S quoted in Brinksman, ‘Internet Social Networking’, p4.