‘Public History’ as a Vocation

Abstract

The paper analyzes the contents and objectives of ‘public history’, the relationship between scholarly and popular knowledge, conventions governing the representation of the past outside the academic context, and the transfer of scholarly knowledge from academic to media environment. The article is divided into sections titled What? Who? When? Why? What for? and How? These lapidary subtitles reflect the fact that very little has been written about public history yet, and a preliminary review of the field is necessary. First of all, we need to determine what kind of new historical work it is, and to draw several distinctions between different types of historians who engage in professional and/or public history. Public history is treated as a specific type of historical judgment and historical practice, thus the analysis of ‘public history’ covers cognitive aspects as well as social ones.