A debate that continues to resonate both within the academic community and the wider public centers around a basic question; to whom does the past belong? Thomas Cauvin explains that this question emerged from the movement toward a “bottoms up” model presented by new social historians of the 1960s. Cauvin explains that “social history asked for a more popular and participatory construction of history” and calls this process between historians and the public in the creation of public history “sharing authority” (Cauvin 2016, 216). However, he is quick to point out that sharing authority with the public presents several challenges, particularly regarding confronting difficult or undesirable histories (Cauvin 2016, 222). The objective of historians should be, according to Cauvin, to encourage critical understanding of the past rather than providing “read made answers to the public” (Cauvin 2016, 225-226). A public with a firm grasp of critical literacy can mitigate many of the challenges historians face when sharing authority.
Understanding what the public knows, or does not know, about history has long been the focus of historians in establishing what to present to the public and how to encourage public interest in history. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen flipped this concept with their pathbreaking work, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, that sought to quantify not what the public knows, but how they feel about what they know, which offers a “counter voice to the chorus of social critics who, for much of the past decade, have called our attention to the appalling extent of "historical illiteracy" in the United States” (Conrad 2000, 16). To accomplish this goal, Rosenzweig and Thelen conducted several surveys designed to interpret how people feel about and interact with history. The data they collected found that the public overwhelmingly felt negatively about the word history and associated it with forced memorization of “boring” facts in school (Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998, 6). In contrast, their data showed that the term the past “best invited people to talk about family, race, and nation, about where they had come from and what they had learned along the way (Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998, 6).
The study also identified some interesting patterns related to the trust the public associated with the sources where they consumed history. While “boring” school was at the bottom of the scale, the public were more likely to trust sources that could be more intimately linked to their personal history (Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998, 31-32). Highest among these trusted sources were family members, followed by museums and historic sites which “sparked an associative process of recalling and reminiscing about the past that connected them to their own history” (Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998, 32). In addition to investigating feelings toward terminology and institutional trust, the study also sought to explain its findings that showed that American interest in the past was greater than generally conceived. There were many driving factors in this, which Michael Zuckerman bluntly points out are inherently self (or at best) family-centered; including concepts of identity and immortality (Zuckerman 2000, 19-20; Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998, 45, 60). Zuckerman implies that this general selfishness on the part of the public is another failing to be heaped upon the pile of their unworthiness to be involved in the process of creating history, but other historians involved in a round table discussion of the project disagree and see Rosenzweig and Thelen’s findings as a generally useful groundwork to shape their work in public history. In this groundwork, public historians can find new ways to “build on their personal connections to the past as part of the strategy we use in crafting presentations and exhibitions” that bridge “family and community solidarity, identity, and the search for what the authors call an "unmediated" relation with the past” (Conrad 2000, 25; Grele 2000, 32).
Our perspectives as trained historians have often created an “us versus them” division between ourselves and non-professional “outsider” history. Rosenzweig and Thelen’s study shows that while people have an easier time connecting to more personal histories, the connections nevertheless do exist and they can be a valuable resource for public historians to tap into if we remember that our place is not to define history with a capital H, but to work as “mediators between the past and the present” and strive to share authority with the public who, after all, care about the past much more than we often give them credit for (Filene 2012, 24; Corbett 2006, 38).
Bibliography
Cauvin, Thomas. “Shared Authority: Purposes, Challenges, and Limits.” In Public History. 216-229. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Conrad, Rebecca. "Do You Hear What I Hear? Public History and the Interpretive Challenge."" In The Public Historian 22, no. 1 (Winter 2000). 15-18. Accessed February 10, 2023, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3379325
Corbett, Katharine and Howard Miller, “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry," The Public Historian 28, no. 1 (Winter 2006). 15-38. Accessed February 6, 2023, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/tph.2006.28.1.15
Filene, Benjamin. “Passionate Histories: ‘Outsider’ History-Makers and What They Teach Us,” The Public Historian 34, no. 1 (Winter 2012). 11-33. Accessed February 6, 2023, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/tph.2012.34.1.11
Grele, Ronald J. "Clio on the Road to Damascus: A National Survey of History as Activity and Experience." In The Public Historian 22, no. 1 (Winter 2000). 31-34. Accessed February 10, 2023, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3379329
Rosenzweig, Roy and David Thelen. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Zuckerman, Michael. "The Presence of the Present, the End of History." In The Public Historian 22, no. 1 (Winter 2000). 19-22. Accessed February 10, 2023, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3379326
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