Building Bridges between Academic and Public History

Abstract

David Glassberg has articulated important connections between the practice of public history and recent scholarship on the social construction of memory, suggesting that the concepts and questions driving the latter can form the intellectual center of the former, a field that to date has been defined, as Glassberg notes, largely in vocational terms. In response to Glassberg's recommendations, one can imagine dozens of graduate students in public history programs conducting ethnographic research to determine how audiences negotiate varied meanings in a museum exhibition or living history presentation, how the interpretive slant of a public history program has been shaped by the institutional commitments and bureaucratic practices of the sponsoring organization, and what popular meanings inhere in officially sanctioned historic places. Indeed, a review of recent syllabi for public history courses suggests that such work is already underway.1