Public History, Civic Engagement and the Historical Profession in Britain

Abstract

My purpose is to test the proposition that academic historians are central - rather than peripheral - to the practice of public history. Public history generally refers to work that is pursued outside the academy, by the combined efforts of historians and lay people, often pursuing a heritage agenda with a strictly local remit. The resulting enlargement in the scope of historical enquiry is greatly to be welcomed, but it should not be treated as the sum total of public history, still less as grounds for disparaging the historical profession. The civic importance of academic historians arises from their ability to enhance public understanding of national and international issues which form no part of 'public' history as usually understood, because they transcend questions of locality and identity. The health of a representative democracy depends in part on the citizen's readiness critically to examine issues which do not affect him or her directly but which are in the public interest. This argument was first made by the leaders of the historical profession following the Second Reform Act in 1867. During and after the First World War it was put into practice, not least within the pages of History (taken over by the Historical Association in 1916). More recently the relationship between active citizenship and critical history has been re-asserted for the digital age by the History and Policy website. © 2014 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.