Public History in International Perspective
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Edited by:
Indira Chowdhury
Debates about historical knowledge have focused more and more on how the discourse of the past is constructed and expressed in the public domain. Contemporary interest in public engagement with the past is increasingly focused on the contested nature of historical knowledge in settings that speak to international and transnational considerations.
This new book series seeks fresh and insightful scholarly perspectives on international public history, through contextually grounded case or comparative studies that engage an international readership and can shape transnational discourse about the modes, meanings and uses of public history.
The interdisciplinary nature of public history is often explicated in different forms around professional structures; government and political agencies; academic study and collaborative community involvement; vernacular initiatives and political mobilization; performance and the arts; and transformative digital innovation in public history practice.
This book series will explore the difference an explicitly or implicitly international sensibility makes for understanding these issues in emerging practice around the globe. Themes might include but are not restricted to memory debates; museums, monuments, heritage sites, and public spaces; migration; redefinitions of public spaces, urban history and commemoration; artistic, performance and multimedia public engagements; activism and scholarship; and community mobilization and organizing through public history.
The series will predominantly feature single-authored monographs in English. But thematically focused edited volumes may be included as well. Proposals can be case studies in specific settings, or thematic studies that are internationally comparative. All proposals should present critical reflections on public history theory, method, and practice that speak to an international/transnational orientation. All titles should include and examine specific examples of public history content, process, presentation, and engagement as appropriate to the topic and setting.
Advisory Board:
Thomas Cauvin, University of Luxembourg
Bronwyn Dalley, independant scholar, New Zealand
David Dean, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Heather Goodall, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Hilda Kean, UCL, London, UK
Julia Lajus, Carson Fellow, LMU, Munich
Na Li, Zhejiang University, China
Anita Lucchesi, University of Luxembourg
Serge Noiret, European University Institute Library, Florence, Italy
Ricardo Santhiago, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Brasil
Topics
When public history was imported from the United States to China around the turn of the twenty-first century, it was introduced as a sub-field within history, and has developed along that path ever since. Professional historians in China, even some forward-looking ones, see public history as merely presenting a change in the patterns of participation in history-making. This book offers a sharply different view.
It contends, essentially, that public history represents more than a research domain within history or within any existing discipline, nor does it fit into any established narratives, but rather, a fundamental change of the entire process of history-making in China. In this process, the public is prosuming history. Public history makes obsolete the old structure for building and acquiring historical knowledge: it challenges the old assumptions, supersedes the rigid academic hierarchy, and stirs the imaginations of the multitudes. With an assemblage of case studies, this work makes a case for a system view of public history making, or public history(ing), and launches a concept, complex public history, i.e. public history(ing) as complex adaptive systems.
The story of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk epitomizes one of the most important and dramatic clashes in the European culture of memory and public history in last decades. The museum became the arch-enemy for the nationalist right-wing as “cosmopolitan”, “pseudo-universalistic”, “pacifistic” and “not Polish enough”.
Paweł Machcewicz, historian and museum`s founding director, was removed from his position by the Law and Justice government immediately after opening the museum to the public. In his book he presents this story as a part of cultural wars that tear apart not only Poland but also many countries in Europe and on other continents.
If historical culture is the specific and particular ways that a society engages with its past, this book aims to situate the professional practice of public history, now emerging across the world, within that framework. It links the increasingly varied practices of memory and history-making such as genealogy, podcasting, re-enactment, family histories, memoir writing, film-making and facebook histories with the work that professional historians do, both in and out of the academy.
Making Histories asks questions about the role of the expert and notions of authority within a landscape that is increasingly concerned with connection to the past and authenticity.
The book is divided into four parts:
1. Resistance, Rights, Authority
2. Memory, Memorialization, Commemoration
3. Performance, Transmission, Reception
4. Family, Private, Self
The four sections outline major themes emerging in public history across the world in the 21st century which are all underpinned by the impact of new media on historical practice and our central argument for the volume which advocates a more capacious definition of what constitutes ‘public history‘.
