Because it incorporates a wide range of practices and takes place in many different settings, public history proves resistant to being precisely defined.
[5] A 2008 survey of almost 4,000 practitioners predominantly in the U.S. showed that a substantial proportion (almost one quarter of respondents) expressed some reservations about the term and whether it applied to their own work.
[7] Its definition remains a work in progress, subject to continual re-evaluation of practitioners' relationships with different audiences, goals, and political, economic, or cultural settings.
[9] Some of these include: In addition, a sub-field of scholarly study has developed over the past several decades which focuses on the history and theory of collective memory and history-making.
)[11] In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a distinct historical discipline formed within Western universities, and this had the effect of gradually separating scholars who practiced history professionally from amateur or public practitioners.
[13] During the 1970s, a number of political, economic, social, and historiographical developments worked to reverse this trend, converging to produce a new field that explicitly identified itself as “public history”.
In the wake of deindustrialization in many industrial places, governments also supported regeneration or revitalization projects that increasingly included the use of local history and culture as an attraction or a basis for “re-branding” a depressed area.
[16] Out of necessity, inclination, or both, a growing number of people with graduate training in history found employment in these kinds of non-academic settings.
[18] Kelley drew on his own extensive experience as a consultant and legal witness in water litigation cases in conceiving the idea of “public history” as a field in its own right.
From 2018 IFPH has published its own journal International Public History edited by Andreas Etges (LMU, Munich) and David Dean (Carleton University, Ottawa).
[28] In several countries, studies have been conducted to explore how people understand and engage with the past, deepening public historians’ sense of how their own work can best connect with their audiences.
[31] The National Council on Public History's Robert Kelley Memorial Award, “honors distinguished and outstanding achievements by individuals, institutions, non-profit or corporate entities for having made significant inroads in making history relevant to individual lives of ordinary people outside of academia.”[32] Its recipients reflect a broad mix of scholarly, governmental, and popular projects: