Public History in International Perspective - Böcker

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‘.

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.

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.

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.