New Field, Old Practices: Promises and Challenges of Public History

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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_article_5483
dc.title	New Field, Old Practices: Promises and Challenges of Public History
dc.contributor.author	Cauvin Thomas
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Digital Publishing, Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari
dc.type	Research Article
dc.language.iso	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/magazen/2021/1/new-field-old-practices-promises-and-challenges-of/
dc.description.abstract	Although public history is becoming increasingly international, the field remains difficult to define and subject to some criticism. Based on sometimes long-established public practices, public history displays new approaches to audiences, collaboration and authority in history production. This article provides an overview of public history, its various definitions and historiography, and discusses some of the main criticisms of the field. Public history is compared to a tree of knowledge whose parts (roots, trunk, branches and leaves) represent the many collaborative and interconnected stages in the field. Defining public history as a systemic process (tree) demonstrates the need for collaboration between the different actors – may they be trained historians or not – and aim to focus on the role they play in the overall process. The future of international public history will involve balancing practice-based approaches with more theoretical discussions on the role of trained historians, audiences and different uses of the past.
dc.relation.ispartof	magazén
dc.relation.ispartof	Vol. 2 \| Issue 1 \| June 2021
dc.issued	2021-06-30
dc.dateSubmitted	2021-02-02
dc.identifier.issn
dc.identifier.eissn	2724-3923
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.identifier.doi	10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2021/03/001
dc.peer-review	no
dc.subject	Collaboration
dc.subject	Collaboration
dc.subject	Ethics
dc.subject	Ethics
dc.subject	Historiography
dc.subject	Historiography
dc.subject	Memory
dc.subject	Memory
dc.subject	Public history
dc.subject	Public history
dc.subject	Training
dc.subject	Training

Research Article
open access

Thomas Cauvin C2DH, Université du Luxembourg

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abstract

Although public history is becoming increasingly international, the field remains difficult to define and subject to some criticism. Based on sometimes long-established public practices, public history displays new approaches to audiences, collaboration and authority in history production. This article provides an overview of public history, its various definitions and historiography, and discusses some of the main criticisms of the field. Public history is compared to a tree of knowledge whose parts (roots, trunk, branches and leaves) represent the many collaborative and interconnected stages in the field. Defining public history as a systemic process (tree) demonstrates the need for collaboration between the different actors – may they be trained historians or not – and aim to focus on the role they play in the overall process. The future of international public history will involve balancing practice-based approaches with more theoretical discussions on the role of trained historians, audiences and different uses of the past.

Subtags: Documents Afterlife Textual data Hermeneutics Publication Discourse Participation Society Communities

Published

June 30, 2021

Submitted

Feb. 2, 2021

Language

Keywords: Training • Collaboration • Public history • Memory • Ethics • Historiography

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2021/03/001

Copyright: © 2021 Thomas Cauvin. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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