Robert Kelley and the Pursuit of Useful History

Robert Kelley was born in Santa Barbara, California, in 1925, the son of a corner grocer and his wife. He attended public schools and, after service in the Air Force at the end of World War II, graduated in 1948 from the small local college that would one day become a campus of the University of California (UCSB). He completed his Ph.D. studies in history at Stanford, concentrating on the west with a focus on California water politics. His dissertation was published as Gold Versus Grain: The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in California’s Sacramento Valley (1959). Hired in 1955 to join the UCSB History Department to teach and write on California history, Kelley’s scholarly interests took a sharp turn toward the comparative study of nineteenth-century American, British, and Canadian politics, leading to The Transatlantic Persuasion (1969), a bold and original synthesis.

What, then, was my senior colleague Bob Kelley’s “field” when I joined the UCSB History Department in 1966? He taught California and western history, and with considerable enthusiasm. He showed no further interest in comparative Atlantic politics, but began a book project leading to the influential synthesis, The Cultural Pattern of American Politics: The First Century (1979). Bob Kelley, I would have said in the 1970s, had “changed fields” from California and the West, was now a prominent political historian interested in the entire sweep of our national politics.

Yet even as Cultural Pattern went to the publisher, his colleagues became aware that Kelley was not just “changing fields,” but planning to plant on our university campus a new graduate training and research effort to give visibility and new energy to a scattered and heretofore unnamed part of the history profession almost entirely ignored by academic historians and their institutions. He called it “Public History.”

Looking back, I realize that I was given a hint of his direction one evening when he invited my wife and I to dinner shortly after I arrived at UCSB in 1966. That evening we heard his account of what had been a career-bending experience for him—a series of eleven consultation contracts with the California Attorney General’s Office in which Bob was hired to provide reports and expert testimony in connection with flood and condemnation suits in the Sacramento Valley.¹ In the 1970s, he thought deeply about the implications of his off-campus consultant role.

The 1970s brought a relentlessly shrinking job market for history professors, and my department’s tenured history colleagues helplessly bemoaned the lack of jobs for their graduate students. Bob Kelley, however, took action. Remembering his well-paid professional work in the court system in Sacramento, and the accompanying gratification that came to an ivory tower academic when asked to bring his research and presentation skills to bear upon important public problems, Bob in 1975–76 established in our department the nation’s first graduate history program (or perhaps there was a tie for first, as Peter Stearns and Joel Tarr at Carnegie Mellon were at about the same time taking similar if less visible steps) in Public History. It is not important who “was first” in establishing a graduate program. Bob Kelley did not stop there, but (with the participation of colleague Wesley Johnson) established The Public Historian, and then published in that journal in 1978 a powerful essay defining public history and offering an expansive and optimistic vision of its possibilities.²

Terminology would be a contentious issue, as Public History programs and professional activities expanded across the country. Bob firmly opposed the term Applied History, and no better substitute was to come forward. He persuaded me to teach in this program when the first class of graduate students arrived in 1976, the faculty (me included) still trying to figure out how to teach this topic that Bob had planted in a very conventional history department. He then took the lead in securing a Rockefeller Foundation grant funding a national conference in Montecito in April 1979. The meeting attracted more than fifty historians (95 percent of those invited to the three-day gathering), a...