Volume 4, Issue 2

The remembrance of the death of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Republic of the Congo in Belgium is indicative of a fundamental transformation in the latter country’s public memory of its former role as a colonizing power in Central Africa. After decades of public amnesia and hesitation to confront the past, a new narrative is slowly gaining ground. A gradual transformation process is taking place at the intersection of historical research, political intervention, and popular culture. Changes in Belgium’s memory landscape not only reflect wider international trends but also express national and particular sensitivities.

This article examines how memory activism can contribute to the democratizing of history through the example of a specific protest campaign in which activist historians among other groups and civil society actors attacked the dominant narrative of the “clean Wehrmacht” represented by a veteran association of Mountain Troops. It interrogates the Public History approaches of the activists and their impact on the local level of the Bavarian town of Mittenwald, where the protests took place between 2002 and 2009, in order to find out how participatory their construction of an alternative historical narrative actually was. Although memory activism has obvious benefits especially in dealing with painful pasts, the article also reveals its limits, as such benefits are contingent on the extent to which historian activists share their authority and the way they deal with public, as well as their own, emotions.

Through a case study of the World War II reenactment movement in Poland, this article analyzes the relationship between the processes of the democratization of history and the normalization of the Nazi past. There are numerous groups whose members dedicate their time to represent Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS units and do so in the public while reenacting battles or restaging historical events. Despite the dominant moral attitude which condemns representing troops that committed war crimes and atrocities, reenactors defend their hobby, offering an alternative, in their opinion, moral and critical way of engaging with the Nazi past. The author argues that presenting views on WWII in the public sphere is possible due to the process of the democratization of history. However, she also demonstrates that the very same process means that reenactors’ efforts are misunderstood by their audiences. Also, these reenactment practices have contributed to normalizing the Nazi past.

Upon the designation of Versailles as a World Heritage Site, UNESCO renamed the Petit Trianon the Domaine de Marie-Antoinette (Estate of Marie-Antoinette). Subsequent tourist materials, such as travel guides and website directories, reiterated this redesignation and retell the site’s historical past through the life of Marie-Antoinette, thereby casting Madame de Pompadour and the Comtesse du Barry to the periphery. This essay analyzes visitor Instagram photos and Tripadvisor reviews to understand how UNESCO’s uniting of the queen’s memory with the Petit Trianon affects tourist interpretation and meaning making. It considers the consequences of the universalization of a single narrative to recount a multi-actor history and highlights the continued erasure of Madame de Pompadour and Comtesse du Barry taking place in visitors’ retelling of the Petit Trianon’s past.

This text reflects on the author’s experience as part of the International Federation for Public History (IFPH) since 2015. In particular, it discusses what IFPH has meant for practitioners trying to leverage public history in service of social change in contexts of historical inequality and violence, and how it could potentially enhance its service even more. The text emphasizes how different local trajectories have resulted in different approaches to public history practice and makes an invitation to continue pushing for the de-centering and de-colonization of the field of public history by putting into question the academic limitations inherited from the epistemologies and trajectories of the Global North.

This article discusses the main characteristics of public history in Colombia, taking into account the challenges of the current political context. From a Latin American perspective of public practices of history, characterized by collaborative research and dialogue between diverse disciplines and knowledge, we analyze some of the experiences developed in Colombia in recent decades. We particularly study the ways in which public history has fostered an open discussion around the armed conflict, the recent peace process, and the social mobilizations of the last years.