n.the use of historical skills, methods, and interpretation to make history relevant and useful outside of academiaBenson, Brier, and Rosenzweig 1986, xviiThe practitioners of this “applied” history are served by the growing number of university-based programs providing “more” or “better” or “more professional” public history through a variety of practical programs on public policy, business history, editing and archival practices, local history, and historic preservation.Karamanski 1990, 7For this reason, the suspicion with which many academic historians greeted public history, which by its very nature was involved in dialogue with the public, was logical and perhaps even beneficial.Walters 1991, 485The discipline of public history, which has aided history departments in preparing their students for history-related careers beyond the academy, has great potential for enhancing the training and education of archivists.Mooney-Melvin 1999, 14Public history became an organizing principle for those who were already employed as historians in nonacademic settings, historians who believed in the importance of communication with a broader public, as well as those individuals interested in pursuing history as a career but not inside the academy.Ritchie 2003, 41Public history is an organized effort to bring accurate, meaningful history to a public audience, and oral history is a natural tool for reaching that goal. The oral history and public history movements share a natural affinity, both having attracted practitioners and audiences different from those for more traditional history writing.Weible 2008After considerable internal discussion, NCPH board members recently suggested that public history is “a movement, methodology, and approach that promotes the collaborative study and practice of history; its practitioners embrace a mission to make their special insights accessible and useful to the public.”Weible 2008But a majority probably just defines the field by the workplace: academic history, they assume, is practiced within the university, public history elsewhere. So perhaps it is fruitless to seek consensus on a single definition.NCPH 2021The public history “movement” emerged in the United States and Canada in the 1970s, gaining visibility and influence through the establishment of public and applied history programs at universities. The founding of the National Council on Public History dates to this period, as does its scholarly journal, The Public Historian.
