Casual observers might assume that public historians and archivists enjoy a close working relationship. Both fields share a commitment to preserving historical documentation and making history accessible to diverse popular audiences. Practitioners typically work in a broad array of institutions ranging from large federal agencies to small non-profits. They generally endorse such core values as open access to information, respect for personal privacy, ethical approaches to community engagement, and methodological transparency. Public historians and archivists often participate in joint advocacy efforts, attempting to hold public agencies and private institutions accountable by promoting sound recordkeeping practices and solid historical studies. They share similar funding sources, and have benefited from the support of such governmental agencies as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Beneath the surface, however, a clear disciplinary divide has complicated relationships between these two professions. Public historians and archivists attend different professional conferences, read different journals, pursue different degrees, and train in different graduate schools. Their foundational literature contains little overlap. Distinct historical factors have shaped their basic principles and practices. In fact, public history and archives professionals remain peculiarly isolated from each other, as well as from academic historians. A brief consideration of their distinctive histories over the past forty years largely explains the separation, but also points toward collaborative possibilities for the future.
Public historians brought a messianic zeal and an expansive vision to their work in the late 1970s, as they began to define their field of study. Though historians always have attempted to engage multiple publics, a group of university-based scholars coalesced roughly forty years ago around a series of theoretical and practical issues in an effort to revolutionize their discipline. In part, their work grew out of the community-based History Workshop movement associated with the Marxist historians Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, and their colleagues in Britain. It also owed much to the rise of New Left scholars in the United States, who sought to link their work with working-class audiences, racial and ethnic minorities, and the social protesters who were challenging social and academic norms. Public historians at the time enthusiastically embraced new fields including popular culture studies, local and community history, visual literacy, and critical media analysis. They incorporated such seemingly radical methodologies as oral history into their work. They considered museum exhibitions and film to be legitimate methods of scholarly output, equal if not superior to the traditional monograph. Public historians remained committed to producing carefully considered and cutting-edge historical scholarship, but they sought out venues where they could communicate their conclusions in popularly accessible and innovative formats. Perhaps more than anything, they developed the concept that communities and professional academics needed to work together to co-create histories. A sacred concept for these public historians involved the need to “share authority” with community insiders, amateur historians, and local lore-keepers when crafting historical interpretations.
Vocational interests, however, also drove the public history movement during its early years. A shrinking academic job market, the radical overproduction of history doctoral degrees at elite academic institutions, and concerns that humanities education appeared tangential to American life drove historians to seek out new connections with the marketplace. The first issue of the Public Historian, which appeared in 1978, claimed that an untapped market existed for public history professionals in the following areas: governmental agencies, corporations, research institutes, electronic and print media, historical sites, environmental organizations, archives and historical societies, museums, national and state parks, and educational institutions. Robert Kelley, one of the influential founders of the movement, made the occupational link even more explicit by defining public history “in its simplest meaning” as “the employment of historians and the historical method outside of academia.”1 He described an ideal public history curriculum as containing extensive practical experience through structured internships, opportunities for team-based collaborative work, and coursework outside of history in such fields as public administration, business economics, and environmental studies. By the early 1980s, several universities had established degrees and concentrations in public history, including pioneering programs at Middle Tennessee State, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of South Carolina, Arizona State University, Loyola University, and New York University. Some programs concentrated their curriculum on such particular public history subspecialties as public policy, historic preservation, and film. Others offered a potpourri of individual courses on a diverse array of topics. Clearly, the first generation of public historians viewed their domain as broadly encompassing a wide range of sub-disciplines. Still, their relationships with many of these related fields remained tenuous. This proved especially true in the case of archival management. No public history program contained extensive coursework that explored archival theory and practice. A typical offering might include one elective archives course, usually taught by an adjunct working in the field. This single course itself often featured a substantial practicum component that focused on processing collections, thereby privileging experiential learning over theoretical discussion and classroom work.
As public historians began to craft new academic programs in the 1970s and 1980s, archivists also turned their attention to graduate education. Traditionally, archivists entered their profession in one of three ways. Some archivists, often with graduate history degrees, pursued internships, apprenticeships, or on-the-job training to secure positions at historical societies and institutional repositories. Others completed the two-week National Archives Institute, offered annually by the National Archives and Records Administration, as a form of postappointment training or an entrée into entry-level governmental archivist positions. A few sampled the modest graduate offerings that were provided by some library schools and history departments. These programs typically featured a three-course sequence, wherein budding archivists completed an introductory course, a practicum or internship, and some research-based independent study project. Most archival educators constituted long-time practitioners who taught individual classes on an adjunct basis. In virtually all programs, practical hands-on training prevailed.
The late twentieth century, however, produced a revolution in archival theory and practice. Several factors especially influenced this professional transformation. First, beginning in the 1970s, social historians challenged the elitist nature of archival practice, arguing for more broad-based and representative collections that better documented the lives of ordinary people. A new generation of activist archivists embraced innovative appraisal methods, collection development practices, and documentation strategies that sought to satisfy these critics. Second, user communities diversified and began making unprecedented demands on repository staff. To consider just one example, genealogy emerged as a wildly popular hobby, with family historians now dwarfing university-based academics as the most numerous and loyal archival consumers. As new audiences especially began to discover archival collections through the World Wide Web, archivists recognized the need to revamp reference programs and educational offerings to better serve their patrons. Third, descriptive standardization evolved rapidly as archivists placed a priority on sharing information through national bibliographic databases. This placed demands on archivists to remain current with changing data content standards and structures, access tools, and content management systems. Fourth, technological shifts altered the nature of records themselves. “Born digital” documentation constituted perhaps the premiere archival challenge by the 1990s, as archivists struggled to keep up with the massive proliferation of electronic records. Similarly, digitization of analog records proliferated at a dizzying rate, raising access, preservation, and prioritization questions. Any archivist who entered the field via the apprenticeship training model that was common in the early 1970s, expecting to find a sleepy and scholarly craft that operated according to ancient and time-worn practices, likely would have been overwhelmed by the scope and pace of changes that altered the profession by the turn of the twenty-first century.
These developments heavily influenced university-based education. It became increasingly apparent to archival educators that they needed to revamp their curricula, expand the scope and content of their programs, and play a greater leadership role in the field. Large library schools in particular began hiring full-time archival educators, and sophisticated multi-course master’s programs developed at such institutions as the University of Texas, University of Pittsburgh, University of Michigan, University of Maryland, University of California at Los Angeles, and Simmons College. Doctoral programs in archival studies soon followed. A few history departments, including New York University and Western Washington University, also expanded their archival faculty and offerings in order to respond to these trends, but by and large archival education by the year 2000 overwhelmingly resided in Library and Information Schools. Archival and public history programs thus moved in radically different directions. Many history departments proved slow to recognize the impact of digital technology and reluctant to introduce technical “training” into their curriculum. They continued to view archives as primarily institutions that existed to serve historians, and remained only vaguely aware of the factors that had transformed archival theory and practice. Archivists viewed historical methodology and scholarship as less relevant to their core disciplinary concerns and tangential to their educational needs. The more sophisticated archival graduate programs began supplementing informational theory readings by incorporating a healthy dose of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and critical race theory into their reading lists. Few archival educators, however, offered even a rudimentary engagement with the issues that preoccupied most public historians.
Archivists and public historians now appear increasingly disconnected at a particularly perilous and transformational historical moment. On the one hand, digital technology has promoted a de facto convergence of both fields and created new collaborative opportunities. By the early 2000s, the most innovative public history projects contained substantial archival components. Such pioneering endeavors as the September 11 Web Archive and the Hurricane Katrina Digital Memory Bank attempted to capture documents and memories relating to these tragedies almost as they happened. They ingested stories, email messages, visual images, and reminiscences virtually at the point of creation, recognizing that collecting projects required a nimble and flexible approach in order to document contemporary events. Unfortunately, as the public historians who pioneered these projects readily acknowledged, they operated without much understanding of the collecting procedures, authentication practices, metadata standards, and digital preservation issues that archivists had been developing for a generation. Similarly, archivists have necessarily expanded their institutional roles into the domain of public historians. They increasingly create physical and virtual exhibits, interpret historical documents and collections online for broad public audiences, and serve as teachers and educators for diverse patrons who may never have been exposed to basic archival concepts. Yet few archivists have any training in exhibit design, documentary editing, or museum education, all of which constitute standard elements in many public history programs.
Further, a common theoretical base should inform both types of programs. Memory, commemoration, and heritage constitute central concepts for both archivists and public historians. Yet most archives graduate students receive only the most tangential exposure to the lengthy debates within these fields, a particularly problematic situation considering the volatile and heated discussions surrounding these issues in the public sphere. Archives on many college campuses, for example, have been at the center of attempts in recent years to document histories of institutional slaveholding, provide historical context for Confederate memorials, and reexamine the complicated legacies of once-venerated iconic figures. Public historians have long struggled with these issues and effectively developed practices and guidelines for addressing them. Public history graduate students, for their part, learn little about the historical factors that have produced the contemporary archival infrastructure in the United States. Such classic archival theorists as Sir Hilary Jenkinson and Theodore Schellenberg remain absent from public history debate, though their principles remain crucial for understanding the development of recordkeeping institutions and the biases inherent in the documentary record. Similarly, as contemporary archivists have embraced community engagement and “do-it-yourself” archiving, the public history field has failed to take notice.
Finally, the current political situation offers special challenges. Public funding has buttressed important archival and public history initiatives over the past two generations. Neither the federal government nor individual states appear likely to sustain such levels. Popular newspapers and academic journals regularly bemoan a “crisis in the humanities” as declining enrollments have led to departmental mergers, fewer course offerings, and a declining job market nationwide. Public history sites, ranging from Colonial Williamsburg to small historic house museums, have witnessed declining attendance and struggle to survive. Open government, public records access, civic engagement, lawful dissent, and the free press all appear under siege in an increasingly authoritarian environment. Indeed, the increasingly popular notion that we live in a “posttruth” culture where facts are merely malleable, evidence no longer matters, and analytical depth has been replaced by demagogic tweets calls into question the purposes of both maintaining archives and bothering to carefully craft honest historical interpretations. More than ever, archivists and public historians need to pursue joint advocacy efforts, aggressively lobbying for the importance and centrality of their work. They must become effective communicators and storytellers, informing public debates and using their skills to shape policy discussions across all media formats. And they should do so in concert, drawing on their mutual professional strengths in order to enrich public discourse.
Barriers to cooperation remain formidable. Archives and public history educators already feel pressured to incorporate a broad array of topics into a crowded curriculum. New media have amplified demands that students master diverse technological skills before even entering the workplace. Job prospects in both professions seem shaky, with employers too often offering abysmal entry-level salaries and limited opportunities for career advancement. Graduate programs in both fields have multiplied, increasing competition for prospective students and tuition dollars. Many archives programs especially have embraced distance learning, which too often contributes to departmental silos, absentee faculty, and disconnected students. Master’s programs generally have witnessed enrollment declines in the 2010s, even as the overproduction of degree recipients has flooded job markets. None of these factors contribute to collaborative and collegial environments. Their particularistic histories, as well as current marketplace realities, continue to drive these professions apart and institutionally isolate their leading educators. Still, these factors need not prove insurmountable. Both professions, after all, can point toward shared values, rich intellectual traditions, and pragmatic mutual interests that should unite them. As a sense of crisis envelops the humanities and information professions, perhaps the moment to find common ground has arrived.
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Notes
1 Robert Kelley. “Public History: Its Origins, Nature, and Prospects,” The Public Historian 1:1 (Fall 1978), 16.