Need a written response to the 2 chapters attached in the PDF. The response has to be between 300 and 400 words. All of the referencing should come from the 2 chapters only no outside sources.
CHAPTER 1 What Is Public History? 1 Introducing Public History dialogic history free-choice learning shared authority setting problems problem solving historical method audience collaboration stakeholders reflective practice contextualized learning banking and problem-posing models of education Public history is so diverse that even practitioners struggle to define it succinctly. In 1978, historian Robert Kelley, who founded one of the early graduate programs in public history, wrote, “Public history refers to the employment of historians and the historical method T TT T“HEN YOU THINK ABOUT learning history, do you imagine sitting in a class- •\ / V / room and reading a textbook? The book you now hold introduces a different V V approach to history that focuses on engagement. Introduction to Public History: Interpreting the Past> Engaging Audiences addresses history that people encounter outside the classroom and beyond the traditional history text. Its chapters guide you, the student, through an initial encounter with the field of public history, introducing you to underlying issues, theories, and core principles that ground the field. This book focuses on the big ques tions that underpin the how and, most importantly, the why of public history. ! standards, what distinguishes them from public history: 1. Audience. The audience is public, not academic. Public historians think differently about audience than they would when sharing their research in academic circles. The general public does not think about their own pasts or their relationship with the past the same way historians think about history. Understanding the audience means understanding what different publics expect and value when it comes to engaging in historical exploration. This textbook will introduce you to several different theoretical perspectives that help us work more effectively and ethically with public audiences. 2. Collaboration. Public historians practice two types of collaboration. First, they col laborate with the public. Public historians need to think beyond how they will best serve the public’s needs as audiences or consumers of history, and to think carefully about how they will work with stakeholders—those who have a specific interest or a stake in the topics we study, the communities about which we write, or the institutions or places where we work. Stakeholders might include the people whose story a public history project will tell, board members at a public history institution, outside of academia.”1 If we agree that academia is a term used to describe institutions of higher learning like colleges and universities, then what is “outside of academia”? You can find public history at a museum, in a historic house, on a walking tour of a historic dis trict, or on YouTube. Public historians can produce documentaries, historical markers, and smartphone apps. The field is broad enough to include more ephemeral venues as well: a community event, a theatrical performance, a folk-art demonstration. There are more forms of public history than we can name here, and new ones appear all the time, which is one of the things that makes the field vibrant and exciting. But the question of venue—“inside the academy” vs. “everywhere else”—does not cap ture all of the differences between public history and traditional academic history. Before we look at those differences, however, we must recognize what all historians share with one another. This is what Kelley called, in his definition, the “historical method.” All forms of history begin in the same place: with solid historical research based on a rigorous ex amination of available sources. All historians, regardless of where they work or who makes up their audience, rely on the systematic and critical examination of sources within their historical contexts to reveal stories of the past, to explain change and continuity over time, to consider contingency, and to reconcile competing versions of past events as preserved in a variety of historical sources. Through this process, we assign meaning to the past, taking a wide range of materials and using them to form a coherent argument about the meaning and significance of past events. These practices make up the historical method. Historians place their work within the context of what we already know and make efforts to contribute to that knowledge by using sources that have not been used before, by asking new questions of familiar sources, or by using sources in novel ways. The centrality of the historical method to public history is the reason you will find “Thinking Historically” as the next chapter in this textbook. If public history and academic history share similar research methods and interpretive standards, what distinguishes them from one another? Some key concepts stand out for 2 A CHAPTER 1 Audience funders, or politicians. Stakeholders are also potential members of the audience, but we distinguish them because of the specific relationships they have with the history being interpreted. Collaboration with the stakeholders whose history is being told is one of the defining features of public history work. The second form of essential col laboration requires work with professionals in other disciplines. Since public history involves skills that go beyond those of a historian, public historians collaborate with scholars and experts in other fields. Academic historians often work alone to produce a monograph; public historians work in teams to produce projects. 3. Reflective Practice. Public historians intentionally incorporate what they learn from the successes and failures of their professional experiences into future interpretive and engagement strategies. All historians have ethical responsibilities. We must represent primary sources fairly and accurately and acknowledge when we draw on the work of other scholars in our own work. Public historians have added ethical responsibilities that require many layers of reflective practice that will be discussed throughout the book. Who Is the Public? What Is Their Relationship with "History" and "The Past"? If one of the major defining characteristics of public history is a public audience, then who is this “public” and what is their relationship with history, or what some prefer to call “the past”? In 1994 and 1995, a group of historians conducted extensive phone interviews with 1,453 Americans in an attempt to explore how they understand their pasts and interact with history. In The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (1998), historians Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen interpreted the interviews and argued that Americans actively engaged with the past as they sought to understand the forces that had shaped the individual people that they were in the present and that would affect the people they wanted to become in the future. The survey respondents also expressed strong preferences for how they got information about the past. They trusted museums the most, with personal accounts from relatives following closely in second place, and firsthand accounts from someone who had been present at an event in third place. College professors, high school teachers, and nonfiction books still held some credence, but participants ranked movies and television programs as the least trustworthy (table 1.1). Americans also told the researchers they wanted to be able to assess what they learned from any source against their own previous knowledge and draw conclusions for themselves. Before Rosenzweig and Thelen, historians had not spent much energy analyzing their audience. While museum studies scholars and practi tioners were already thinking deeply about audience reactions to exhibitions and museum visits, Rosenzweig and Thelen looked at people’s relationship with the past in the totality of their lives. Their study remains our best source of information about the attitudes different populations have about their own relationship with history and the past, something that is not captured in visitor surveys about specific exhibitions. INTRODUCING PUBLIC HISTORY ▲ 3 I 8.8 (181)8.0 (789) 8.0(615) 8.2(189)8.4 (289) 8.0(177)7.8 (790) 7.8 (611) 8.2(188)7.9 (290) College history professors 7.1 (161)7.3 (692) 7.4 (537) 8.3 (172)7.0 (261) High school history teachers 5.9 (178)6.6 (771) 6.7 (594) 7.5(189)6.2 (293) Nonfiction books 5.4 (169)6.4 (747) 6.4 (583) 6.6(181)5.6 (278) 4.2 (180)5.0 (783) 4.9 (610) 6.0 (189)5.2 (291) Table 1.2. 59% 61% 38%8% 4% 26% 10% 7%4% 3% 7%4% The past of the United States 22% 5%24% 11% 22% , - -v.-W1 69% h ....... ■ "■ ■ ir Tables 1.1 and 1.2 are from Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) and are reproduced (with edited captions) with permis sion of the publisher from http://chnm.gmu.edu/survey/tables.html. Movies or television programs about the past Conversations with someone who was there The past of your racial or ethnic group The past of the community in which you now live Personal accounts from your grandparents or other relatives 100% N=191 100% N=176 8.4 (778) 100% N=796 100% N=616 100% N=297 s _____... ii------------------------*4 7.1 (176) Table 1.1. Trustworthiness of Sources of Information about the Past—By Racial/Ethnic Group ....... ... ......... Museums 8.6(185) ' ? X': The past of your family 8.5 (608) ■i 1 „ 11 J 50% ■ ij / : a n h___ .................. _ i............. __........ .it. 8.1 (283) Respondents were asked about seven "places where people might get information about the past."They rated the trustworthiness of each "as a source of information about the past using a 1 to 10 scale," with 1 meaning "not at all trustworthy'and 10 meaning "very trustworthy." This table reports the mean score the national sample and four racial/ethnic groups gave the sources of information in the far-left column.The number in parentheses indicate the number of respondents on which each mean is based. Respondents were asked the following question: "Knowing about the past of which of the following four areas or groups is most important to you—the past of your family, the past of your racial or ethnic group, the past of the community in which you now live, or the past of the United States?"This table reports the percentage of respon dents in the national sample and four racial/ethnic groups that chose each of the pasts in the far left column. Most Important Pasts—By Racial/Ethnic Group - ------- - ......... £ ! --------------- ■■— ....—il ,i 66% http://chnm.gmu.edu/survey/tables.html INTRODUCING PUBLIC HISTORY 5 Who Does the Public Trust? Rosenzweig and Thelen found that the public trusts the history they learn about in museums more than any other source, for two very different reasons. First, people in the study concluded “museums arrived at their interpretations only after experts pooled their independent research.”4 In other words, historians and professionals in other fields had worked with one another to develop interpretations; one interpretation had not been able to control the museums agenda. Second, museum exhibits allow members of the public to interact directly with “real” objects from the past, devoid of interpretative Diversity of Public Experiences “The public” includes many different people with very different personal experiences. Diversity may come in the form of age, educational background, economic standing and class, religious diversity, different abilities, diversities of language, as well as cultural, racial, and ethnic diversities. Sometimes we can understand diversity of experience in terms of privilege or marginalization. For example, nondisabled people experience privilege every day whether they recognize it or not. A person with a disability might never see someone like themselves depicted in a public history venue. In fact, disabil ity-rights advocates had to wage protests to add a statue of President Franklin D. Roosevelt sitting in a wheelchair to the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, although his paralysis during his presidency is now widely known. The Presence of the Past revealed that Americans who had historically been marginalized, specifically African Americans, American Indians, Mexican Americans, and LGBTQ_ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) individuals, often understood themselves to be part of a specific “collective past.” African Americans, for example, used their understanding of the black past to distance themselves from an “official” version of the past organized around a dominant narrative that erased the experiences of their families and communities (table 1.2).3 Potential stakeholders and consumers of public history projects will approach the work through the lens of their own experiences; public history practitioners need to understand that phenomenon. Because different segments of the public will approach history differently based on their own his torically situated experiences, understanding your audiences is complex. You must look deeper when examining which publics you serve as a public historian in order to consider multiple layers of expe rience. For example, understanding basic demographic details of your audience may be a good start, but there are variations beyond typical profiles, such as age, economic levels, gender, race, ability, and ethnicity