The development of public historiography, an introduction to public historiography

Public historiography is a school of history that has emerged in the United States since the 20th century. It has now developed into a new field of contemporary American historiography. It refers to the use of academic history training skills and research results by historians, with the help of other disciplines, to serve various fields of real society related to history, including departments, companies, news, historical sites, and other institutions.

Public history is oriented to the needs of society, and the goal of public history education is to train historians who are suitable for practical practice.

"Public history" is a new field of contemporary American historiography, which emerged in the mid-70s of the 20th century and has now gained considerable momentum and scale. At present, the history departments of nearly 100 universities in the United States have set up graduate degree programs in public history, and public history courses have also entered the undergraduate teaching of history departments in many colleges and universities. In 1978, the American historiography community founded the professional journal The Public Historian.

In 1980, the National Council on Public History (NCPH) was established, which became a national professional academic body of "public historians" from different fields engaged in public history research and public history practice. Although the field is still in the exploratory stage in terms of teaching curriculum and establishing professional norms and evaluation standards, as an emerging discipline, it has opened up new avenues for historical research and application, and posed a serious challenge to traditional academic historiography. In view of the lack of attention paid to the development of public historiography in the United States, this paper will examine its origin, development, and evolution, and put forward some views on the related topics it has raised, especially its relationship with traditional historiography and the relationship between historiography and the construction of American citizenship.

It can be said that understanding public historiography and the discussion surrounding it in the American historiography community is of great enlightening significance for people to think about the development of Chinese historiography in the 21st century.

As a new branch of historiography, public history has some different characteristics compared with academic historiography. In terms of research mode, academic historiography generally involves scholars discovering and solving problems by themselves, and the authors' own interests have a great influence on the selection of research topics. Public historiography, on the other hand, takes the needs of social reality as the goal, and takes the questions raised by departments, social institutions, companies and individuals as the object of investigation, and the needs of clients, the interests of the public, and the preferences of authors are combined to determine the selection of topics. From the perspective of teaching content, academic historiography is a formal and systematic indoctrination of historical theories and historical knowledge to students. From the perspective of the application of historiography, public history also requires students to learn interdisciplinary and interprofessional knowledge and methods.

From the perspective of educational methods, the teaching activities of academic history are mostly in colleges and universities, and the teaching methods are mainly narration. There are many opportunities for public history to go out of the campus, and the teaching methods are diverse and lively, often in the form of reports and discussions, inviting leaders and company leaders to discuss with students the gains and losses of ** or corporate policies. Students are also required to choose their own topics and conduct research on a problem in a community, historic site, department, or company, and the school assists in finding a mentor in these institutions to guide the students in writing a research report with the school teacher. From the point of view of the presentation of research results, academic historians present their research results in the form of monographs or **, and they directly face the students in the academy and their peers; In addition to the above methods, public historians can also write their research results into concise and popular historical reports, or tell rough stories in museums and historical sites, or disseminate them through news**, so that more people can understand their research results more quickly.