Public History and the Study of Memory

Author(s): David Glassberg

Source: The Public Historian, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), pp. 7-23
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the National Council on Public
History
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 History and Memory

Public History and the

Study of Memory

DAVID GLASSBERG

IN THE PAST DECADE, dozens of new certificate and degree programs in

public history have trained historians for work in museums, archives,
historic preservation, and public policy positions. Within these new pro-
grams a central question-how is public history different from conventional
academic fields-has been answered in primarily vocational rather than
intellectual terms. We think of public history as a collection of career paths,
not a coherent subject of study.
During the same decade there has been an explosion of scholarship
examining the images and uses of history in Western culture. Ranging from
broad overviews such as David Lowenthal's The Past is a Foreign Country
(1985) and Michael Kammen's Mystic Chords of Memory (1991) to mono-
graphs such as Karal Ann Marling's George Washington Slept Here (1988)
and my American Historical Pageantry (1990) to special issues of the
Journal of American History ("Memory and American History"-March
1989) and Representations ("Memory and Countermemory"-Spring
1989), the new scholarship explores the various ways that the memory of a
society is created, institutionalized, disseminated, and understood. The
current fascination with memory among a wide variety of disciplines,
including history, shows no sign of abating: the theme of a recent Organiza-
tion of American Historians meeting (Chicago, March 1996) was "History,
Memory, and Identity."

DAVID GLASSBERG is associate professor of history and director of the Public History Pro-
gram at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of American Historical
Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (1990), and Public Histo-
ries: The Place of the Past in American Life (forthcoming, 1997). The author acknowledges
the assistance of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funded several of the
public projects described in this essay as well as a research fellowship during 1993-94 that
allowed time to reflect on them.
7

The Public Historian, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring 1996)

? 1996 by the Regents of the University of California and
the National Council on Public History

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8 a THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

Despite the simultaneous development of public history and writin

public memory during the past decade, little has connected them. Few
scholarly works on memory have incorporated insights from public
ans' experiences working in museums, historic sites, and historic pre
tion agencies; few public history projects in museums, historic site
preservation agencies have made use of theories developed in the sc
research on memory.'
The separation is unfortunate, because the new scholarship on me
offers us a new way to think about public history, a common intel
foundation for the diverse enterprises taught and practiced under it
Understanding the various ways in which societies think about the p
use it in the present can help public historians to understand the in
tional contexts in which they operate as well as the presuppositions
history with which the public approaches their work. Moreover
historians are well positioned to contribute to this scholarship. The i
public historians gain from working with the public in a variety of se
the first-hand knowledge of how historical knowledge is created, inst
alized, disseminated, and understood, can help revitalize the entire hi
cal profession as it redefines itself both professionally and intellectu
the years ahead.2

What do historians talk about when they talk about memory

profusion of terms-collective memory, popular memory, public me
countermemory-suggests that memory requires further definition
field of study. Before demonstrating the importance of the scholars
memory to public historians and the important contributions that
historians can make to this scholarship, we first need to understan
emergence as a historical and intellectual phenomenon.
At first glance the study of memory seems a new field, but i
historians have long been interested in tracing how ideas about
change over time. For decades, we have taught the history of what his
have thought about history and called it historiography, making it
central to training future generations of professionals. At the sam

1. Among the best examples of memory scholarship based on personal experie

public history work are Michael Frisch's Shared Authority: Writing on the Craft and
of Oral and Public History (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990) and the publications of the Cen
History-Making in America at Indiana University. See Lois Silverman, ed., A Bibliogra
History-Making (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 1993). This b
phy is essential for teachers in public history programs, listing many more examples o
scholarship on memory than can be mentioned in this essay.
2. The Organization of American Historians recently devoted an entire Council o
newsletter to the question of "Rethinking Public History." Its five essays address
important concerns of curriculum and professional identity, but not the role of memor
as a component of public history training or an example of how academic and public h
practices can be integrated. See Jannelle Warren-Findley, "Integrating Public and
History: Is it Possible? Is It Wise?" OAH Council of Chairs Newsletter 45 (June 199

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 PUBLIC HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF MEMORY * 9

literary critics and art historians have examined historical imager

works of artists and writers, while folklorists have investigated th
tales of less socially prominent groups. And political historians
plored the changing historical reputations of heroes such as Jeffe
Lincoln, the notions of history embedded in the ideology of
movements such as republicanism or populism, as well as how gov
officials have employed historical analogies in the making of publ
What distinguishes the new scholarship on memory from the o
subject matter but approach. Whereas earlier studies primarily
characterize a single group or institution's beliefs about its past, t
studies primarily seek to understand the interrelationships betwee
ent versions of history in public. They investigate what anth
Robert Redfield termed "the social organization of tradition": how
versions of the past are communicated in society through a multip
institutions and media, including school, government ceremonies,
amusements, art and literature, stories told by families and fr
landscape features designated as historical either by government o
practice. In a sense, the new memory scholarship broadens th
institutions and ideas included in the traditional historiograph
viewing professional historical scholarship as not the only thou
history but one of several versions of the past competing for infl
public in a particular place and time.4
With this change in approach has come a shift in focus from stud
institutions that produce history--colleges and universities, go

3. Among the early scholarship on images and uses of the American past
associated with the "myth and symbol" school of American Studies such as Henry Na
Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard Unive
1950), Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambrid
University Press, 1953), and William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Ol
American National Character (New York: George Braziller, 1961); each saw
historical consciousness as central to holding together the societies they studied.
relationship of contemporary studies of memory to American Studies scholarshi
"Monuments and Memories," American Quarterly 43 (March 1991): 143-56. O
historiography, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Questi
American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). On
intellectuals' use of the past, see Warren Susman "History and the American Inte
Uses of a Usable Past" [1964], reprinted in Culture as History: The Transfor
American Society in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 19
historical consciousness of minorities, see Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and
sciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Studies of the changin
reputations of political figures include Merrill Peterson's The Jefferson Image in th
Mind (1960) and Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Pr
For a pioneering investigation of historical representations in political mov
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, From Bryan to FDR (New York: Vin
1955); for a more recent example, see Dorothy Ross, "Historical Consciousness in
Century America," American Historical Review (October 1984): 909-28. On decisi
see Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History fo
makers (New York: Free Press, 1986).
4. Redfield uses "Social Organization of Tradition" as the title for Chapter 3
Society and Culture (1956), reprinted with The Little Community (Chicago: U
Chicago Press, 1967), 40-59.

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10 * THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

agencies, mass media-to studying the minds of the audiences w

these versions of the past converge and are understood. Whereas
approaches assumed that audiences for history more or less unders
same historical images the same way-if George Bancroft's histori
popular, it meant that they embodied an American popular h
consciousness-new approaches emphasize the many different m
audiences derive from the same historical representation. The mean
historical book, film, or display is not intrinsic, determined sole
intention of the author, but changes as audiences actively reinterp
they see and hear by placing it in alternative contexts derived fr
diverse social backgrounds. To paraphrase Carl Becker, every pers
or her own historian, creating idiosyncratic versions of the past th
sense given personal situations and experiences. But then how can w
meaningful generalizations about a public history?5

The Problem of Scale: Individual and Collective Memory

Indeed much of the new scholarship on memory examines com

tion about the past only at the most intimate of scales: autobiogr
memory and reminiscence. Psychologists and oral historians explo
individuals in recalling the past form a coherent personal identity
of self, telling stories that place themselves at the center of historica
or their "uchronic dreams" that combine recollections of the even
how they thought history should have turned out. How individuals
ber is of obvious importance to oral history interviewers and sho
incorporated into the oral history practice of public historians; how
focus on personal memory and an individual's idiosyncratic recoll
the past is not particularly useful to historians working with larger
More useful is the scholarship investigating how individual memor
past are established and confirmed through dialogue with others.
vidual memory is the product of group communication, intimately
a collective memory of the community. Historians working with co
groups are in a good position to investigate how stories about the
handed down within families, or circulate among friends. They are
good position to discover the relationship of the memories that c
among family and friends to the historical representations that cir
public on a wider scale, in towns, regions, nation, mass media. The m
history projects connected with the fiftieth anniversary of Worl

5. The new scholarship reflects the impact of communications theory, esp

developed in the Birmingham (UK) "school" of cultural studies. Among the most use
introducing this literature are the essays in Robert C. Allen, ed., Channels of
Television and Contemporary Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carol
1987-or see the second edition of this work published in 1992), and Nicholas Di
Eley, and Sherry Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contempor
Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

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 PUBLIC HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF MEMORY 0 11

offer opportunities to consider how family stories told about Wor

have been shaped by the larger political culture and mass media an
merely unmediated personal reminiscence. This leads to a larger qu
one that has been at core of much recent scholarship on memory: wi
possible versions of the past that circulate in society, how do p
accounts of the past get established and disseminated as the pu
How do these public histories change over time?6

Public History as Political Culture

One approach to these questions is to analyze how the prevailing

of the past in a society reflect its political culture. In the wake of c
sies over the Smithsonian exhibit on the end of World War II or the
of national history standards and textbooks for schoolchildren, few
that the question of whose version of history gets institutiona
disseminated as the public history is a political one, and that publi
embodies not only ideas about history--the relation of past, presen
future--but also ideas about the public-the relationship of diverse
in political society. Contemporary debates over the politics of public
have only increased the importance of public historians reading sc
on the political uses of history in the past, as reflected in the estab
of war memorials, civic celebrations, and public institutions such a
ums, archives, and historic sites.'
For some scholars, public historical imagery supplies the my
symbols that hold diverse groups in political society together. In t
of Benedict Anderson, a shared history--elements of a past remem
common as well as elements forgotten in common-is the crucia
in the construction of an "imagined community" through which d
individuals and groups envision themselves as members of a collect

6. The insight that oral history interviewees usually place themselves at the cen
historical events they are describing appears in Linda Shopes, "Popular Consc
Local History: The Evidence of Oral History Interviews," International Oral Histor
tion, 1994. The term "uchronic dreams" appears in Alessandro Portelli, The Deat
Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: SUNY Pr
a fascinating book of essays exploring how individuals and communities remembe
On personal reminiscence as a spontaneous individual activity, see Robert N. Butle
Review: Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged," Psychiatry 26 (February 1
On the social construction of individual and collective memories through group c
tion, see Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper and Row,
the essays in David Thelen, ed., Memory and American History (Bloomingto
University Press, 1990) and David Middleton and Derek Edwards, eds., Collective R
ing (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990). See also the important collection on g
memory, Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women's Words: The Feminist
Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991).
7. The controversies over the Smithsonian exhibit on the end of World War II
a torrent of writing on the politics of public history; see, for example, "History and
What Can We Handle? A Round Table about History after the Enola Gay Con
Journal of American History 82 (December 1995): 1029-1144.

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12 n THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

a common present and future. From W. Lloyd Warner's analysis o

memorative rituals in Yankee City (Newburyport, MA) in the 1950s
Robert Bellah's characterization of a national civil religion in 1967,
analyses such as Pierre Nora's multivolume exploration of the
m6moire" in France and Michael Kammen's description of the
chords of memory" in the U.S., one strand of analysis has portray
politics of public historical representation as essentially consensua
bodying an underlying civic or national faith beneath ethnic
divisions.8
Other scholars depict the practices and representations of public history
as instruments in the political struggle for hegemony among various social
groups. From the wide-ranging essays in the Eric Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger anthology The Invention of Tradition (1983), through Michel
Foucault's linkage of systems of knowledge and power in France, George
Mosse's studies of the representation of the past in fascist Germany, or
Raphael Samuel's exploration of British national identity, this strand of
analysis identifies public history with the master narratives that elite sup-
porters of the nation-state impose from the top down to consolidate control
over their citizenry. Historical imagery disseminated by government and
mass media advance the imagined community of the nation while suppress-
ing authentic local and group memories and collective identities. The
prevailing framework for analyzing the politics of public history versus
popular memories, the one underlying John Bodnar's Remaking America:
Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century
(1992) and many of the essays in the recent anthology edited by John Gillis,
Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (1994), sharply delin-
eates between an official history that government agencies such as the
military and the National Park Service employ to maintain the political
status quo and a multiplicity of vernacular memories that ordinary citizens
employ to sustain ties of family and local community.9
As the spirited contemporary debates over the nation's history show, a
civil-religion approach that emphasizes public history's role in holding

8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of

Nationalism (New York: Verso, rev. ed. 1991); W. Lloyd Warner, The Living and the Dead: A
Study ofSymbolic Life ofAmericans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959); Robert Bellah,
"Civil Religion in America" Daedalus 96 (Winter 1967): 1-21; Michael Kammen, Mystic
Chords of Memory (New York: Knopf, 1991); Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History:
Les Lieux de Mdmoire" Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7-25. For a superb critical
assessment of Nora's work, see Nancy Wood, "Memories Remains: Les Lieux de M6moire,"
History and Memory 6 (Spring/Summer 1994): 123-49.
9. See Michel Foucault, Language, Countermemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Inter-
views, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); George Mosse, The
Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germanyfrom the
Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich (New York: H. Fertig, 1975) and Fallen Soldiers:
Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);
Raphael Samuel, ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity
(London: Routledge, 1989). See also the essays in Robert Johnston, et al., Making Histories:
Studies in History Writing and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

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 PUBLIC HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF MEMORY * 13

political society together tends to overlook how dissenting voice

experience, the historical visions of minorities, and conflicts over th
struction and dissemination of a public history. Nostalgic for a
national culture, whether a conservative version that could reinforce
patriotic orthodoxy of the Cold War or a liberal one that could p
understanding between particular racial, ethnic, class, or sexual ident
and communities, these works tend to see the practice of public hist
actually integrating society rather than as an effort by some to stru
reality for others. But the prevailing framework pitting official history
vernacular memories also oversimplifies the play of forces shaping p
history. Concerned that depictions of the nation's "collective" beliefs
values might endanger minority rights, these works tend to overloo
apparent spontaneity and depth of emotion associated with national h
ries-not only flag-waving on the political right, but also the emerge
progressive nationalist visions such as the CIO in the 1930s or M
Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. In fact, there are multiple official histo
well as multiple vernacular memories. Analyses of the politics of com
cation about history must not only explain how the nation-state appro
and transforms vernacular memories into its official history, but al
national imagery acquires diverse meanings from the local contexts in
it is displayed. They must examine how public history simultan
reproduces the unequal political relationships of a society, throu
relative power of groups in society to have their version of history ac
as the public history, and serves as an instrument through which
relationships are transformed, through the interaction of that public
at the local level with the other versions of the past that circulate am
ethnic, fraternal, or labor organizations, as well as among fam
friends.'0
The new scholarship analyzing public history as political culture has
important implications for how public historians think about their work.
Inevitably, public historians operate between competing political forces, as
well as between local and larger-scale interpretive frameworks as they place
a local story in larger context. Since it is nearly impossible to reach a
consensus on the public interpretation of a historical event that anyone still
cares about, public historical representations such as an exhibit, war memo-
rial, or commemorative ceremony are often deliberately ambiguous to

10. An insightful criticism of the civil religion approach appears in Steven Lukes, "Political
Ritual and Social Integration," Sociology 9 (May 1975): 289-308; for a lengthier critique of the
historiography of American patriotism, see my review essay "Patriotism from the Ground Up,"
Reviews in American History 21 (March 1993): 1-7. In conceptualizing how public historical
imagery both reproduces and transforms political relationships, my thought has been influ-
enced by William H. Sewell, Jr. "A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,"
American Journal of Sociology 98 (July 1992): 1-29. For an exemplary case study examining
the conflation of local and national historical imagery, see Alon Confino, "The Nation as a
Local Metaphor: Heimat, National Memory, and the German Empire, 1871-1918," History
and Memory 5 (Spring/Summer 1993): 42-86.

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14 a THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

satisfy competing factions. They are examples not of collective me

rather of what James Young has termed "collected memory"-dis
often conflicting memories brought to converge in a common spa
like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. The task of t
historian may be more to create spaces for dialogue about history a
collection of memories, and to insure that various voices are hear
spaces, than to provide a finished interpretation of events trans
latest professional scholarship for a popular audience."

Public History as Popular Culture

The dialogical nature of public history is especially evident

examine historical imagery in commercial mass media and touris
tions, representations shaped less by politics and the desire to com
official ideology or a sense of collective identity than by the mark
the desire to appeal to large numbers of people in their leis
Popular appeal is the lifeblood of commercial historical ventures
decline of government and foundation funding for history, all bu
exclusively scholarly of historical institutions are increasing their
and promotion to bring more visitors through their doors or to b
constituency for their work. As public historians seek larger an
audiences and cater to popular expectations, will the conventions
other popular media play a greater role in shaping the form and
their work? Roy Rosenzweig documented how the popular jo
convention of the human-interest story permeated the prese
history in American Heritage magazine in the 1950s and 60s; can
history be far behind in the 1990s? In the future, will every
documentary or exhibit need a happy ending to compete for mass
Will historic sites and districts more and more resemble theme
as the one Disney proposed in Virginia? Will mass culture in
century prove to be a more powerful force than the nation-stat
twentieth century for the standardization of public historical ima

11. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Mea
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). For more on the historian's role as a creat
spaces for dialogue about the past, see John Kuo Wei Tchen, "Creating a Dialo
The Chinatown History Museum Experiment," in Museums and Communities: T
Public Culture, ed. Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine
Smithsonian Press, 1992), 285-326.
12. Roy Rosenzweig, "Marketing the Past: American Heritage and Popular Hi
United States," in Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public, ed. S
Brier, and R. Rosenzweig (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 21-
Davis demonstrated how the dictates of commercial television broadcast shap
memoration of the Constitution bicentennial in "Set Your Mood to Patriotic:
Televised Special Event," Radical History Review 42 (1988): 122-43. On the con
the Disney version of history and what appears elsewhere, see Richard Francav
Street USA: A Comparison/Contrast of Streetscapes in Disneyland and Walt Di

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 PUBLIC HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF MEMORY * 15

The new scholarship on how audiences create meanings from

culture products can help us understand the growing convergence
and popular history. Works such as George Lipsitz, Time Passages:
tive Memory and American Popular Culture (1990) argue that
neither passively receive nor actively challenge the historical imag
encounter in popular television docudramas, music, film, novels, a
attractions, but rather "negotiate" between mass culture and t
particular subculture. To appeal to the widest possible audience
historical representations, like other pop culture forms, incorpora
ety of possible characters and themes with which diverse audi
identify their particular concerns. Even the most commercial o
products contain the suppressed collective memories of subordinat
embedded within it; through close analysis, audiences can rec
hidden meanings and memories encoded in these narratives.
history does not impose a single view of the past on the masses, b
communicates a multiplicity of submerged alternative visions acce
audiences competent to decipher them according to their soc
ground.
Analyses of public history as popular culture, emphasizing the multiplic-
ity of possible readings of historical texts, has the same limitation as scholar-
ship examining public history as political culture: they still do not tell us
much about how real audiences communicate and respond to the history
they see and hear. Do audiences really interpret history based primarily on
their social characteristics such as gender, class, and ethnicity? Or is educa-
tion and ideological stance a better determinant of how a text is interpreted?
How competent are most audience members to recover the hidden mean-
ings in popular culture texts, to construct an alternative interpretation of
historical events by reconfiguring the information present and supplying
what is left out? And what about the role of intermediaries in guiding
audience reception? We not only see the film but read the review, with
expert commentators classifying the texts according to larger categories and
interpretive conventions. Doesn't being told that the historical account they
will see is "true" affect how it is understood as much as the particular social
position of the audience member? It would seem that to discover the
alternative contexts and narratives in which audiences might piece together
the public history they encounter, we need to find out what other stories
they might have heard, and the audience members previous relationship to
the source of information, i.e., what sources do they consider reliable? I
would guess that for most Americans the National Park Service or the
Smithsonian's reputation for accuracy would make their representations of
history more trusted than those of a commercial television network-

Journal of Popular Culture 15 (Summer 1981): 141-56; Mira Engler, "Drive-Thru History:
Theme Towns in Iowa," Landscape 32 (1993): 8-18; and "Symposium: Disney and the
Historians--Where Do We Go From Here?" The Public Historian 17 (Fall 1995): 43-89.

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16 * THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

though the recent controversy over the Smithsonian's Enola Gay

demonstrates how fragile that trust might be.'3
Public historians can help the scholarship on memory advance b
merely opening up a text to the range of possible readings encoded
to discover what meanings actually surfaced in particular historic
tions by adding a survey or ethnographic component to their wo
than a decade ago, Janice Radway surveyed a group of women read
Midwest about their reaction to different romance novels, and con
out of their likes and dislikes a portrait of their mentality concerning
relations. Public historians are in an ideal position to conduct the s
of field research. Day to day they see history not only as created
author, but also as reshaped by the institutional bureaucracy and
preted by various audience members. If the meaning of a historic
not intrinsic but changes with context, then public historians can in
the successive contexts created by the author, by institutions of co
tion, and by audiences, tracing the social organization of knowled
the past in particular settings. This kind of audience research is des
merely to make interpretation more popular to attract more visi
rather to understand better the preconceptions about history wit
audiences approach our work.14
Consider, for example, a family visiting a National Park Service
site. What at first glance seems a historical interpretation handed do
a central office in Washington, Denver, or Harpers Ferry turns ou
product of the interaction of national and regional offices, betwe
personnel and local interest groups, as well as between NPS and th
in the field. Park Service personnel have a lot of autonomy in the
of what information to give visitors, and park visitors continue to
and reinterpret the history they see and hear in terms of family
contexts. At the same time, the tendency in an era of declining res
justify park operations in terms of audience size generates pr
present history in a way that appeals to the greatest number of v
Although NPS has not yet put a ripped bodice on an entrance sign,
expect Park Service interpretation more and more to resembl
historical attractions. In tracing history within the NPS, each
communication offers its own context that shapes the meaning of the

13. On the role of interpretive conventions in guiding audience reception, se

Allen, "Reader Oriented Criticism" in Channels of Discourse: Television and Cont
Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 254-89; see al
Michelle Condit, 'The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy," Critical Studies in Mass C
tion 6 (June 1989): 103-22.
14. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular L
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). Excellent examples of r
how audience expectations affect historical interpretation appear in two anthologies
by the Smithsonian Institution Press: Jo Blatti, ed., Past Meets Present: Essays Abo
Interpretation and Public Audiences (1987), and Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kr
Steven Lavine, eds., Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture

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 PUBLIC HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF MEMORY * 17

being told, meanings that the public historians who work for and
might recover through close observation and analysis.'"
Or consider the response to popular historical documentaries
Ken Burns's The Civil War. During March 1991, I read the lette
received at his home in New Hampshire as a way to begin to charact
only how Burns constructed the story (where he got his informat
what contexts he placed it in) but also, to some extent, how
constructed the meaning of what they saw and heard. Many letter
remarked that the series reminded them of other TV shows, or ot
about the Civil War. Many more were prompted to discuss how they
about the war from their families. Nearly one-third of the letters
received mentioned family members, suggesting that these viewer
national history presented in the film through the lens of the
history.'6

Public History as Place Consciousness

History offers ways not only to communicate political ideology and group
identity, or to make a profit, but also to orient oneself in the environment.
Public histories provide meaning to places. Whether a film showing a Civil
War battlefield or the designation of a local historic site or district, all
connect stories of past events to a particular present environment. Histori-
cal consciousness and place consciousness are inextricably intertwined; we
attach histories to places, and the environmental value we attach to a place
comes largely through the memories and historical associations we have
with it. What cognitive changes occur when an environment is considered as
historical, either by government designation or popular practice, or when a
civic organization such as the local chamber of commerce creates maps and
historical atlases that recognize some historical places but not others? If the
scholarship on the politics of public history has special relevance for histo-
rians who curate and present the past in government museums and historic
sites, and the scholarship analyzing public history as popular culture has
special relevance for historians who work in mass media or who increasingly
must rely on popular appeal to keep their institutions afloat, then the
scholarship on how memories attach to places has special relevance for
historians who work in cultural resources management, helping communi-
ties to define and protect their "special places" and "character" through
historic preservation strategies.

15. The local impact on NPS interpretation is likely to grow as more and more sites enter
into joint management agreements with local historical agencies and volunteer groups, such as
at Lowell National Historical Park.
16. See my "Dear Ken Burns: Letters to a Filmmaker," Mosaic: Newsletter ofthe Centerfor
History-Making in America 1 (Fall 1991): 1, 8.

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18 a THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

Over the past decade, just as historians have studied the m

historical consciousness--how ideas about history are created, instit
ized, disseminated, understood, and change over time--other d
have investigated place consciousness, what scholars in enviro
psychology, folklore, and cultural geography call "sense of place.
chologists have explored how children bond emotionally with place
develop, and memories of childhood places, particularly envir
explored between the ages of 6 and 12, remain a crucial anchor for
identity in adulthood. A sense of place is further developed and re
by the social networks participated in as an adult; the longer one
place, the more likely that the environment becomes saturated wit
ries of significant life experiences with family and friends. Psyc
have also explored the emotional consequences when the bonds
people and places are broken, the grieving for a lost home that occu
the elderly or exiles forcibly deprived of their familiar environm
memory sites. Marc Fried, in studying the relocation of 500 Bost
dents to make way for an urban renewal project in the 1950s, no
nearly half exhibited symptoms of depression even two years after
He also noted that Boston's "West End" gained an intelligibility in
that it might never have had in experience--a destroyed collection o
became a single "neighborhood" or place primarily through the me
its destruction.'

17. Interestingly, there is little historical literature on the evolution of sense of

time, and the processes through which past generations made the environments
lived part of their individual and community identities. Though historians at the t
century such as Frederick Jackson Turner pioneered the study of how Americans i
with particular environments to produce distinctive, place-based local and regional
the historical profession in subsequent years by and large abandoned this study
instead that the nation's high degree of geographical mobility, the centralization o
and political power under modern capitalism, and the spread of a standardized, in
able, instant architecture had left Americans with a sense of "placelessness"--a
belonging in no particular place. I discuss the problem of "placelessness" in
historical writing in "Place and Placelessness in American History," Organization of
Historians/National Council on Public History Annual Meeting, April 1995. O
relationship to place consciousness, see Michael Steiner, "From Frontier to Region
Jackson Turner and the New Western History," Paci~c Historical Review 64
1995): 479-501.
18. Among the most useful works connecting memory and place from the per
developmental psychology is the anthology Place Attachment, ed. Irwin Altman an
(New York: Plenum, 1992). The emotional power of remembered places is especia
lated in the work of artists and writers, who create powerful identities for themselv
the act of remembering particular places. See, for example, Louise Erdrich, "A Wri
of Place," in A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest, ed. Michael Ma
City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), 34-44, and Wallace Stegner, "The Sense o
Where The Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the
York: Random House, 1992). On social networks and place, see Kathleen Gers
Steuve, and Claude S. Fischer, "Attachments to Place," in Fischer, et al., Networks a
Social Relations in the Urban Setting (New York: Free Press, 1977), 139-61. On urban
in Boston, see Marc Fried, "Grieving for a Lost Home," in The Urban Condition:
Policy in the Metropolis, ed. Leonard J. Duhl (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 15

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 PUBLIC HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF MEMORY 0 19

Whereas psychologists connect sense of place to personal iden

recollection, cultural geographers and folklorists connect it to gro
munication and collective memory. Through conversations amon
and friends about past local characters, about the weather, or abou
local residents transform ordinary environments into "storied
Wallace Stegner notes that "no place is a place until the things t
happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, leg
monuments." Unlike early folklore studies that sought to cap
preserve the romanticized "spirit of place" of the natives in ru
recent research has focused on the often conflicting meanings for
environment communicated among social groups, and how the inve
a collective sense of place, like the invention of a public history, is p
struggle for cultural hegemony, the product of power relations
various groups and interests. Geographers concerned with the i
aspects of place-making seek to supplement psychological and
studies of the subjective experience of place with critical analys
social production of space-how sense of place is affected by lar
economic and political forces that determine the distribution of sl
suburbs in a locale and who gets to experience which place. The est
meaning for a place, and the land-use decisions that stem from tha
ing, are negotiated not only between various residents of a town o
borhood, but also between local residents and the outside world.'9
The scholarship on sense of place in psychology, folklore, and ge
reminds historians that managing cultural resources is inevitab
effort to manage the multiplicity of environmental perceptions, v
meanings attached to a place; when historians bound and mark
places as "historical" and distinguish them from ordinary places, or
stabilize, to restore, or even to remodel a place "in character," whi
whose) version of community, place, and character will prevail? Th
especially important question when it comes to considering th
relationship to the sites that historians produce. By and large tour

19. The folklorist Henry Glassie proclaims that "history is the essence of the idea o
Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster C
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 664. The term "storied pla
from nature writer Robert Finch, who described being initially attracted to Cape
its natural features but by the many stories that had been written about it over the
Edward Lueders, ed., Writing Natural History: Dialogues with Authors (Salt
University of Utah Press, 1989), 44. The Wallace Stegner quote appears in his essay
of Place," 202. A superb introduction to how contemporary folklorists write abo
Mary Hufford, One Space Many Places: Folklife and Land Use in New Jersey's
National Reserve (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1986), and Hufford's an
Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage (Urbana: University of Illinois,
cultural geography's concern with how the social production of space shapes the
experience of place, see John Agnew, "Representing Space: Space, Scale, and Cultu
Science," in Place/Culture/Representation, ed. James Duncan and David Ley
Verso, 1993), 251-71.

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20 * THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

for novelty in a landscape, what is not back home, whereas local

look at the landscape as a web of memory sites and social interac
Research on memory and place should be a regular part of
resources management work, devising programs that seek to iden
protect a community's memory sites, places unintentionally pres
made special by popular practice, as well as historic sites, pla
governments designate as important to a collective political identit
battlefields and presidents' homes, or that local chambers of c
designate as appealing to tourists.2' In 1991, I investigated how the
of "town character" was used in three New England commu
Northfield, a post-card New England village; Wilbraham, a spraw
post-World War II suburb; and the McKnight historic district of
field, a racially diverse urban neighborhood. Part of this research
asking residents in a series of public meetings to discuss the specia
their town or neighborhood, and discovering the divergence
officially designated historic landmarks and community memory
public dialogue revealed the different senses of local history that
different perceptions of the environment. For example, the resto
rian facades of the McKnight Historical District in Springfield hel
ent meanings for middle-class African-American residents moving
the ghetto and middle-class whites moving in from the suburbs. A
other kinds of programs that evoke a community's sense of place an
are photographic projects, neighborhood walking tours led by loc
dents, or public art projects such as Arts in Transit in Boston, in
neighborhood oral historians collaborated with artists in developi
public art that was installed at each station along the Orange Line.

20. See Sidney Brower, "Residents and Outsiders Perceptions of the Enviro
Housing, Culture, and Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
202. Among case studies of historic preservation directed toward tourism see John
Written Suburb (Philadelphia: Temple Press, 1989), Martha Norkunas, The Politi
Memory: Tourism, History, and Ethnicity in Monterey California (Albany: SU
1993), and Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the
Century (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1995).
21. Randy Hester describes these as "subconscious landscapes of the heart," the
local residents feel are part of the "sacred structure" of the town. Randy Hester, "S
Landscapes of the Heart," Places 2 (1985): 10-22. Whereas the residents of
neighborhood are more interested in preserving the places of which they hav
memory than those of the remote past, historic preservation-both in legislatio
tice-emphasizes the remote over the immediate past. In the words of Kevin Ly
continuity is emotionally more important than remote time," Lynch, What Time is
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), 61. David Lowenthal observes that governm
remote, malleable past to a recent one painfully recalled. Lowenthal "Revisi
Landscapes," in Valued Environments, ed. John R. Gold and Jacqueline Burg
Allen and Unwin, 1982), 78.
22. The Orange Line project is described in Myrna Breitbart, Will Holton, et a
a Sense of Place in Urban Communities (Cambridge: Urban Arts, Inc., 1992). A
exemplary efforts are The Bostonian Society's Last Tenement exhibition of Oc
March 1994, which explored the history of Boston's West End, including its destruc
of an urban renewal program in the 1950s. See the exhibit catalogue, The Last
Confronting Community and Urban Renewal in Boston's West End, ed. Sean M
Carolyn Hughes (Boston: Bostonian Society, 1992).

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 PUBLIC HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF MEMORY * 21

historians can participate in the process of placemaking and contribute

local residents' sense of place by adding a sense of location to local resid
sense of emotional attachment, helping residents and visitors alike to s
what ordinarily cannot be seen: both the memories attached to places a
the larger social and economic processes that shaped how the places
made.-

Public Historians and the Study of Memory

By and large the study of memory as the interaction of various versions of

history and audiences in public is only beginning to be written. Only a few
case studies have examined the complex relationships between public
history and political culture, popular culture, and the culture of place-
making in a particular place and time. And we are a long way from a synthesis
of public historical practices over time, in the same way that we can isolate
a historiography of the historical profession. At this point, the most common
case studies trace the changing public history of a single event, such as the
Civil War or Holocaust, in response to political currents.24 Other studies,
operating at a grander scale, contemplate changes in the forms and practices
of remembering, tying those changes to the rise and decline of the nation-
state as a political entity. Pierre Nora's often quoted essay "Between
Memory and History" argues that forms of public history such as the
museum, archives, and marked historical site replaced oral tradition and
places held in memory at about the same time as the emergence of the
modern nation-state in the eighteenth century created discontinuity with
previous regimes, and geographical mobility imposed by modern capitalism
undermined rooted knowledge of particular locales. But John Gillis and
Charles Maier speculate that we are now in a post-nationalist era, when
disillusion with the nation-state and modernity has produced an explosion of
interest in local and family history.A5

23. Dolores Hayden's Power of Place project in Los Angeles sought not only to identify and
mark places that commemorate the achievements of women, non-Anglos, and the working
class, but also to situate those sites in a larger social and political history of the city. Hayden
argues forcefully that the public representation of place should consist of two activities: (1)
making visible previously obscured spaces and the history they represent, and (2) interpreting
the built environment in terms of a "dynamic, aesthetic, social, and economic history of the
production of space." Dolores Hayden, "The American Sense of Place and the Politics of
Space," in American Architecture: Innovation and Tradition, eds. David G. DeLong, Helen
Searing, Robert A. M. Stern (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 191. Hayden describes her power of
place projects in "The Power of Place: A Proposal for Los Angeles," The Public Historian 10
(Summer 1988): 5-18, and in The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
24. Among the best of these studies is Henry Rousso's The Vichy Syndrome: History and
Memory in France Since 1944 (1991), which examines the changing representation of the
Vichy period in postwar France, tying it to organized political movements as well as the deep
structure of French political culture.
25. John Gillis, "Introduction," in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3-24; Charles Maier, "A Surfeit of Memory?

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22 * THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

As well as exploring the changing relationship of grassroots m

and invented national history, historians might examine other ch
public historical representations over time, such as the relationship
depictions of continuity and discontinuity with the immediate pas
nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, events from the
ate past were routinely represented in public orations, parades, and
cal pageants as part of a continuous succession of past, present, and
but by the late 1920s, it was far more common to represent a single h
event rather than a sequence of events, and to choose that event f
distant past. In the words of David Lowenthal, the past became is
a foreign country, disconnected from present and future concern
and under what circumstances did we begin referring to somethi
someone) as "history" when we meant it was over and done with,
ongoing significance for the future?6
Besides comparisons over time, historians might compare public
cal practices across cultures. David Lowenthal observes an essentia
ity in how nations throughout the world have adopted the western
term "heritage"-although the content of each national herita
definition unique, the way that "heritage" is conceived as residing i
unique and exclusive, not shared with those residing outside
boundaries, is the same. In another kind of study, James You
Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (1993) c
the memorialization of the Holocaust in Germany, Poland, Aus
U.S., and Israel, demonstrating how each nation's version of the H
was shaped by its political culture and incorporated into its national
Although examining national differences in historical practices is im
not all public history activity refers to the nation. Studies might
urban and rural historical practices, or the historical practices of d
social classes. Gender differences in public history work offer an e
interesting topic for cross-cultural comparison. Who does history,
It seems that in the U.S., men narrate history as a succession of e
whereas women curate history as a web of objects and places. But
no studies of this phenomenon cross-culturally. These are only a fe
many possible directions for future investigation as memory becom
established as a field of scholarship.21

Reflections on History, Melancholy, and Denial," History and Memory 5 (Fall/W

136-52.
26. I discuss this phenomenon as "the receding past" in American Historical Pageantry
(1990); Charles Maier ties it to the waning power of national ideologies of progress in the late
twentieth century. Maier, "A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy, and
Denial," History and Memory 5 (Fall/Winter 1993): 136-52.
27. David Lowenthal, "Identity, Heritage, and History," in Commemorations: The Politics
of National Identity, ed. John Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 41-57. My
observation concerning gender differences in memorialization is based on my reading of
recent histories of historic preservation, such as James Lindgren, Preserving the Old Domin-
ion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1993).

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 PUBLIC HISTORY AND THE STUDY OF MEMORY * 23

In conclusion, historians have a lot to learn from the new schola

memory. The organization of tradition in society has a history; un
ing this history, and the history-making practices we have inherited
past, not only places our contemporary practices in perspective
offers a new way for historians to ground their scholarly and pro
identities beyond the customary historiography course. In my int
graduate public history course, I regularly include a five-week uni
ing of (1) the changing culture of history-making over time, (2) his
autobiographical memory, (3) history and political culture, (4) hist
popular culture, and (5) history and place as the common cor
students' more specialized studies later. Although future histor
work in a variety of professional settings, from museums and histo
to colleges and universities, they can share a growing body of sch
that concerns the relationship of history and audiences as a new f
for professional training.
Public historians can play a leading role in the development
scholarship. Unlike their colleagues in colleges and universities who
primarily for other historians, public historians routinely practic
tiple communities of discourse about the past. They confront the pr
historical representation on a daily basis, immersed in a world in w
boundaries between knower and known, between subjectivity and
ity, have long been collapsed. Trained historians working in m
historic sites, and community history projects encounter perspectiv
past they never would have encountered solely in the world of pro
scholarship. In presenting history to the public, they soon discover
public is presenting history back to them as well. It is time for som
insights into the relationship of historians and audiences that come
interaction to find their way back to the discourse of the larger h
profession. As political and economic currents increasingly com
historical profession to rethink its relationship with the larger
historical practice will be transformed, whether historians like it
What Michael Frisch has called the shared authority of the public
enterprise has profound implications for how all historians will do t
in the future. Public historians have interesting and valuable stori
and the growing interest in the topic of memory by the larger hi
profession suggests a new desire and willingness to hear them.

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