Corbett and Miller, What is Public History?, and Presence of the Past address a similar subject of collaboration and engagement between historians and the public. They show the importance of not only portraying the truth of history but also including the public in the equation. All of the readings from this week explore the ultimate importance of the historian and the public working together. They show the importance of the public’s personal engagement with the topic, with the history, and with the historians. The collaborative process, the sharing of authority and inquiry, and the engagement of the public are all explored through these works. The week’s theme of the intertwining of the process of public history through the public and the historical process shows how important it is when working within public history to engage not just colleagues within the field, but also to make it relatable personally and academically to those who hold the history in their own background and in their own everyday lives.
Presence of the Past addresses the topic of Public History by exploring it through the research path of oral history. This is accomplished through interviews with over one thousand individual Americans; including interviewees randomly selected, and over six hundred African Americans, American Indians, and Mexican Americans. Within the context of these interviews, the participants were asked several questions regarding the “past”. The surveyors purposely strayed from the usage of the term “history” because it was shown to have a negative connotation attached with it; including the negative response that the authors show comes from high school history. Therefore the results follow accordingly to this pattern, and people interpreted the past to relate more often to their familial lines and ways of preserving that past. The authors appeared to have picked the results for their book that fit the best with each other while only slightly noting the variations that occurred. These results showed that people felt no connection to a cohesive history through high school history, and the book actually tends to focus much more on how people relate to their own personal history, not necessarily the history of museums or of the United States. The authors stated that their argument was that that people pursue the past actively and that it is in fact a part of their everyday lives. Throughout Presence of the Past, Rosenzweig and Thelen argue this point through their research and findings through their interviews. However, the book does not drastically alter the field of history, it does attempt to alter the criticism that a lot of academics hold to be true, that Americans are just not interested or knowledgeable with history. The main issue with this book is that it does not directly address the exact criticism but instead shows what Americans are historically interested and active in, which is most often topics that directly affect the individual’s lives. The book succeeds in showing how Americans are involved in history, and it shows history at the basic level, the individual.
The Final Frontier?
15 years ago
3 comments:
I agree that the book does successfully focus on the individual as an important role in the field of history. I also found it interesting in Rosenzweig and Thelen's "Afterthoughts" how they pressed the fact that the public, or the "historymakers" are being ignored. As you mentioned about the individual being the basic level of history, it is important for historians to listen and to be open to ideas from the public in order to record and preserve history successfully.
I also agree that this study does not alter the field of history. Instead, I think that the study justified that history as a field has been successful in communicating with the public through museum exhibits. As a result of a majority of the respondents trusting and finding museums accessible, history practitioners in museums should be commended for the work they have done in communicating history to the American public and allowing history to be attainable.
I would have to agree that this book does not alter or bring any radical ideas to the field. But it does provide a considerable amount of raw data that can be used in a variety of studies. While it may not directly address some historical criticisms, the difficulty lies in people's varying opinions of certain terms. When asked about history respondents replied "boring" and "irrelevant." It is only by asking questions about different aspects of the interviewee's lives or the "past," as opposed to the term "history," that the interviewers discovered activities that are history related, if not official history. Because of the reluctance for many people to term what they are doing history, like collecting motorcycles, it is difficult to directly refute many claims of historical ignorance about the American public. Especially because traditional conservatives term history the sequential development of great men, great events, and continuing progress. It is these opposing definitions of terms that confuse the argument.
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