Part II: The Public Historian Published Aug. 28, 2024 By Jeremiah D. Foster 377th Air Base Wing History Office KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, N.M -- In order to fully understand public history, one must take into account the vital role that the public historian plays in ethically preserving and presenting historical information. The public historian must consider carefully their ethical responsibilities as they execute their critical part in various processes such as Cultural Landscaping (CL) and Cultural Resource Management (CRM). As public historians engage in their work, they navigate unique issues of Shared Authority, Public Memory, and must consider the context and meaning of objects that they use to represent the past. Public historians employed in the government, museums, and historical societies were previously viewed and referred to as historians engaged in 'alternative careers.'[1] However, organizations like the National Council on Public History (NCPH) helped formalize the field of public history, and it matured in dynamic ways as it started to formalize its methodology and articulate the ethical dilemmas it faced in preserving and presenting public historical narratives. Because of public history's direct role in articulating official public history, its ethics have come to be a defining feature of the field's identity and the nature of its work. As historian Theodore Karamanski points out in "Reflections on Ethics and the Historical Profession," for public historians, "professional status entails a social purpose. History is not pursued for an abstract or individual goal, but because it is a social good."[2] Thus, since its inception, the field of public history has paid close attention to the question of ethical standards, even going so far as to formally codify them via organizational entities such as the NCPH and the Society for History in the Federal Government. Attention to ethical standards represents yet another contrasting element between the public and academic historian. As Karamanski argues, "Ethics were and are more important to public historians than to their university-based colleagues."[3] A public historian's work, after all, can have a direct impact on society. For example, a public historian might craft a historical narrative with little oversight that might influence thousands of people in the general public or impact major decisions in the government. Conversely, Karamanski suggests that the academic historian on the other hand can often produce "half-thought-out hypotheses and see how they fare in professional debate."[4] Ethical mindfulness, then, has been vital to public history methodology because of the direct impact the public historian has on society. A museum curator who inaccurately contextualizes a historic display could potentially affect the views of thousands of members of the public in the space of only a few days. A member of a government Cultural Resource Management institution, and yes, Kirtland AFB has a CRM, is responsible for safeguarding archaeological and historical sites. The failure of a CRM to do so could potentially destroy invaluable historical sites or authorize the cultivation of sites developed only for political or economic reasons. Perhaps the most prevalent ethical consideration public historians must address is how they contribute to the creation of Cultural Landscapes—geographic areas associated with historical events that are identified and developed to highlight particular historical narratives. Military historians often work with their base commanders to do just that. So, there are inherent questions that public historians must be aware of when they participate in Cultural Landscape construction. What areas are chosen? Why are they chosen? And whose view of history do they highlight? In "Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South," historian Reiko Hillyer provides an excellent example of the manner in which public history was used in the U.S. by the leaders of the New South to amplify or de-emphasize certain historical narratives in favor of local political and economic considerations.[5] Daniel Bluestone's "Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation" further adds to this by warning public historians that the preservation of historical buildings and landscapes is rarely ever free of cultural, economic, and political influences.[6] Thus, public historians must carefully weigh their ethical role in assisting in the creation of Cultural Landscapes which preserve and present the past to the public. Memory can be a fickle thing, and yet, despite its capricious nature, it also provides people with their sense of identity. This is no less true in the realm of public history, where cultural memory operates as a fluid unwritten understanding of the past that has been subject to dynamic influences and provides people with a sense of social identity. However, formal written history, unlike memory, endeavors to record historical events from outside the stream of cultural memory, which can so often be riddled with bias and misunderstanding. A danger that written history is also subject to. Cultural memory has often claimed greater power over what people believe happened in the past than that of academic history. Hillyer's work amply demonstrates the way that Southern leaders in the U.S. used historical memory to serve the New South and created usable historical pasts in locally varying ways.[7] Although a more accurate and objective record of the American Civil War era history exists in academia, the collective memory of the South remains starkly contrary to historical orthodoxy. The myth of the Old South, for example, is not only alive and well, but has contributed to the development of public history projects, such as the expansion of the downtown historic district in Richmond, Virginia.[8] Events such as this have been illustrative of the pervasive way that cultural memory has bypassed academic history in informing the general population’s understanding of history. Monuments and historical projects are often pursued because of romanticized cultural memories rather than historical accuracy. In other words, the way that people choose to remember the past collectively often holds more power over how they develop their cultural landscapes than actual formal history does. When writing history, who is the authority, and what sources are authoritative? Historians have grappled with these fundamental questions for centuries, but history’s dynamic nature has continued to make any answer elusive at best. The advent of state-run CRM and its use of Shared Authority represent yet one more example of the desire to answer essential questions about historical conservation and authority. Shared Authority encompasses the work that public historians do to engage their audience in the interpretation of the past. CRM is a governmentally regulated process, which directs the protection and management of natural and historical resources such as the National Parks Service. Shared Authority and its goal to better inform and democratize public history narratives underpin the method by which CRM interprets historical information and develops the public heritage narrative. CRM institutions are charged with supervising society’s cultural resources, which means capturing and preserving public heritage. Perhaps one of CRM’s most significant legal milestones was the passing of the Antiquities Act of 1906. Signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, the Act granted the President the authority to protect natural and/or historical areas by designating them as national monuments.[9] The Act institutionalized CRM in the U.S. and made it a government-directed effort to capture and preserve public heritage. The U.S. is just one of many nations that have made the preservation of history an official function of the state, and like others, the U.S. has had to address the role of Shared Authority in the development of public history narratives. A great example of this can be seen in an essay by Kevin Blackburn’s “Oral History and Public Memories,” in which he examines the Singapore government’s directed CRM program. In it, he demonstrates the way that oral history interviews of certain leaders in the Singaporean government were used to support a particular version of the nation’s history, constructed without the input of other sources.[10] The goals of Shared Authority are partly to the public history method—whether it is manifest in oral history or some other public history venue. It is used to help recognize and incorporate nontraditional sources in order to capture and preserve public heritage. In “A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History,” historian Michael Frisch observes that, “Approaches related to issues of authority, scholarly, and intellectual oral history have been fueled by a diversely grounded impulse to escape the bounds of academic history, to break the bonds of traditionally defined source material and their implicit biases, to broaden participation in the process of historical interpretation, and to empower people who actually make social history in their lives.”[11] This theme is the beating heart of Frisch’s articulation of the concept of Shared Authority. The inherent goals of Shared Authority, as they appear through oral and public history, endeavor to create an “altered relationship between the historian and source,” which deviates from the traditional historical method but is nonetheless a necessity of capturing and preserving public heritage.[12] Oral history has often been distrusted for its inherent biases, inaccuracies, and inconsistencies; however, it is still a valuable form of knowledge, which can serve to inform the work of many public historians and can also be of value to academic researchers. As Frisch points out, oral history is designed to capture “living history, the remembered past that exists in the present.”[13] Thus, oral history is a powerful form of Shared Authority, which assists CRM institutions in developing and preserving public heritage and has long been a cornerstone of the government historian’s methodology. The public historian is unique as they play a direct role in how society at large remembers and understands the past. It is because of that heavy responsibility that public history has been defined by its need to be ethically sound while also engaging a vast array of sources, information, and historical venues that often lead its practitioners far from the traditions and safety of the university setting. Notes [1] Barbara Howe, “Reflection On An Idea: NCPH’s First Decade,” (The Public Historian, Vol 11, University of California Press: 1989), 70. 5 Kelley, “Public History,” 70. [2] Theodore Karamanski, “Reflections on Ethics and the Historical Profession,” (The Public Historian, Vol 21, University of California Press: 1999), 130. [3] Karamanski, “Reflections,” 129. [4] Ibid., 128. [5] Reiko Hillyer, “Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South,” (University of Virginia Press, 2014), i-xvi. [6] Daniel Bluestone, Buildings, Landscapes and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 14-18. [7] James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds. Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006) 24. [8] Horton, Slavery and Public History, 24. [9] David Harmon, Francis P. McManamon, and Dwight T. Pitcaithley, eds. The Antiquities Act: A Century of American Archaeology, Historic Preservation, and Nature Conservation, (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2006). [10] Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, eds, “Oral History and Public Memories,” (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 31-34. [11] Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History, (New York: State University of New York, 1990), 188. [12] Frisch, A Shiared Authotity, 159. [13] Ibid., xvi.