I’m teaching not one but TWO core public-history modules next year (one final year and one MA). Give me your best recommendations for essential reading on doing (and thinking critically about) public history, especially for students making & reflecting on their own projects. Recent pubs especially!
Priya Satia's Time's Monster, perhaps?
A great book! Thanks. One challenge in the UK is that we can only set chapters/articles, not whole books… I’ll have to think if there’s a bit you could pull out.
I’ve had great success with the Radical Objects series from History Workshop. www.historyworkshop.org.uk/archive/?s=R...
If you’re exploring museums and/or material culture, The Wonder House podcast, led by a BM curator, has some really thoughtful episodes. Full disclosure, I feature on a couple but I’m really thinking about the other speakers, especially curators. thewonderhouse.co.uk/podcasts
Lovely, thank you! Students love audio/video, so thus will be much appreciated!
Fab tips
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
That looks fascinating - thank you!
Thomas Cauvin’s excellent and comprehensive intro text has recently gone into its second edition: www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...
Also if you’ve any students interested in Ireland / Northern Ireland there are a few relevant essays (including mine, on photography as a ‘difficult’ source for public histories) in this recent collection - www.routledge.com/Public-Histo...
… if you would like copies of any of them just let me know 👀
That’s all super helpful - thank you SO much!
I set that in my photography module!
I’m no historian but I feel like having behavioural measurements is handy for Uni work, so the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is currently my favourite yard stick, but I wasn’t taught it at school. Dunno why, it feels important.
Thanks for asking this. I wish I had more substantive contributions to suggest, but I'm liking (and reskeeting) to follow.
I teach a 3rd-year module that isn't called public history but fits that theme. I've been using Jerome de Groot, Consuming History (www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...), plus the chapter on public history in the most recent edition of my predecessor Ludmilla Jordanova' book History in Practice.
I think I'm going to try using some chapters from this edited volume, too - because despite the title (at first, I assumed it was a study guide), Part III covers History in Public and is written in an accessible style.
In addition to @sadiahqureshi.bsky.social's great suggestions, I've used Maya Lothian-McLean's Human Resources podcast (esp. the first series) and the Cast in Stone project website from a British and French consortium, hosted at the University of Exeter.
For history and public monuments, one of the students this year also recommended the Contested Histories site, from a team based in The Netherlands - it has a much wider geographical spread, so I think I'm going to use that to refresh the statues and monuments session.
Thank you! I’ve got de Groot and Jordanova. I’ll look the others up! Much appreciated 😊🙏
It’s great to compare notes - it doesn’t feel like my field, though having taught heritage and museum MA degrees, I hope I wing it well. Students enjoy it, but I want to refresh my format this year to keep up-to-date with their interests, too.
Watching these replies with interest! I’m starting a new practice-based PhD programme for public history practitioners this year and I’ve tried in my own writing to critically reflect on practice as much as output. This recent book might be of use - www.routledge.com/Public-Histo...
This was a great keynote on exhibiting psychiatric histories from an @ria.ie conference - www.ria.ie/video/trigge...
www.history.nd.gov/historicsite... this is a good starting point - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_... the links and sources here may give you more, because the Welk homestead one of my favorite recent public history case studies.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=alvC... If you're not familiar with Welk, his "champagne music" (i.e., 'ethnic white' big band music) was already almost deliberately retro by about 1960. fans preserved the homestead where he was born in North Dakota - it became a tourist site.
but by the early 21st century, there were essentially no Lawrence Welk fans left - so now the state of North Dakota runs the site as a historic, ethno-culturally distinct pioneer homestead (the Welks were Crimea Germans).
raises a lot of questions that are key to public history - and you can start class off by playing some of Welk's show and asking the kids what they think.
That’s a really interesting case that I hadn’t come across - thank you!
It's about the US, but Clint Smith's -How the Word is Passed- is a fantastic discussion-starter for how different public-facing organizations memorialize similar events. There are great examples (like the Whitney) and awful ones (like a re-enactment of a Civil War battle).
Oh I loved that book! One challenge in the UK is that we can only set chapters/articles, not whole books… I’ll have to think if there’s a bit you could pull out.
The Whitney chapter is great! It's so good for showing how to do difficult history well, and sets up the big themes for the rest of the book.