"History is a Luxury": Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Disney, and (Public) History

Chicago-based Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. named Paul Hoffman, 41, previously editor-in-chief of Walt Disney’s Discover magazine to the newly created post of publisher.

—Crain’s Chicago Business, June 30, 1997

Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts has even sent half its top managers to . . . Disney University seminars to learn “how you move crowds and keep smiles on people’s faces.”

—The Wall Street Journal, September 4, 1997

“Public history” is a term of art, if ever there were one. Ask your next door neighbor what public history is, and you will not get much of an answer. Not only is public history a term of art, moreover, it is also a term of art of both recent and American vintage. Edward Gibbon would surely not have had a clue about what such a strange phrase meant, but then neither would George Bancroft. Nor, for that matter, would Frederick Jackson Turner. Richard Hofstadter would have found it a rather redundant usage. That is, public history, as we use it now, describes activities that historians have always undertaken, but have only recently distinguished from the “ordinary” work of teaching and scholarship. Of course, it is also true that the notion of history as being primarily, if not exclusively, the work of college and university professors is also a recent and American idea.

Public history is term of art in another sense as well. History is perhaps the only academic discipline to which the adjective “public” can be credibly attached without being either redundant or oxymoronic. Can we imagine “public” chemistry or physics? Or, heaven forfend, “public” literary criticism? While we certainly might describe activities in these areas of knowledge roughly comparable to those undertaken by public historians, I do not think we can imagine that a group of physicists or chemists or critics would distinguish themselves from others in their field by applying the adjective “public” to what they do. No field of knowledge has been so scrupulously, so torturously self-conscious as history, and no branch of historical study has been so simultaneously absorbed by and dismissive of public concerns as American history. It is a point of some significance that there is a National Council on Public History (NCPH), a distinguished learned group with a fine journal, but there are no National Council(s) on Public Physics, Chemistry, or Literary Criticism. It is equally significant that, judging from its journal at least, most members of the NCPH are Americanists.

The rise of public history is an artifact of developments in the discipline that may be quickly reviewed. The great job shortage of the 1970s and 1980s in higher education sent many Ph.D.’s and near Ph.D.’s seeking work in places that would never have attracted their interest when they entered graduate school, hoping to play the game by the rules and land positions in colleges and universities. They found themselves working in journalism, national parks, state humanities councils, museums, libraries and archives, professional associations, state agencies, corporations, and a plethora of other unprofessorial venues. If they taught, they taught in a fashion and to students quite unlike those for which their graduate educations had nominally prepared them. When they undertook scholarship, they undertook it for different purposes and for different audiences than did their graduate school professors or those fortunate few of their own generation who managed to find teaching positions in higher education. They were marginalized by the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the American Historical Association (AHA), and other learned societies, the objects of pity perhaps, but not thought to be doing the real work of history. And, it should also be candidly said, many of them shared this view, hoping to bide their time on the institutional margin until a “real” job opened in a college or university.

As time passed, however, several things became clear. First, the possibility of many new professorial jobs opening was negligible. The shortage of jobs for Ph.D.’s in history abated for a brief moment in the late eighties and early nineties, but it never disappeared; it has...