What is Public History?

Here are some common answers:

1) Public history most often refers to the employment of historians in history-related work outside of academia, and especially to the many ways in which historians recreate and present history to the public-and sometimes with the public. Thus, we find historians working in archives, museums, historic sites, state and local historical agencies, newspapers, businesses, trade and labor organizations, and in all levels of government. They work as editors, archivists, oral historians, administrators, curators, historic preservation specialists, writers, public policy analysts--and, lest we forget, as historians!

2) Public Historians, as opposed to academic Historians, work with and for the general public. They work in archives, museums, public policy organizations, historical societies, and in media. Public Historians are devoted to practicing History outside of the classroom. Historians work for local, state, and national groups including corporations and governmental institutions. The purpose of a public historian is to collect, preserve, and disseminate information on the past. Public Historians use such tools as photographs, oral histories, museum exhibitions, and multimedia to address a wide variety of historical issues and to present those issues to a non-academic audience.

3) Public history is a set of theories, methods, assumptions, and practices guiding the identification, preservation, interpretation, and presentation of historical artifacts, texts, structures, and landscapes in conjunction with and for the public. It is also an interactive process between the historian, the public, and the historical object. Finally, public history embodies the belief that history and historical-cultural memory matter in the way people go about their day-to-day lives.