Radical Public History

How Is Radical Public History Defined?

Like all words, "radical" has a history. What may have been considered radical in 1912 (women voting for example) may seem commonplace today. You could say that radical is in the eye of the beholder. Radical Public History in its current manifestation and as we understand it at the PHC is public history that is meant to shine light on people and topics that have gone unnoticed or intentionally hidden from traditional history. People and topics that seemed not to matter in times past can offer important insights into the ways in which ordinary people (the public) lived their lives in different places and times.  These people and topics were not investigated by historians for all kinds of exclusionary reasons - but the bottom line is that they were not considered important. At the PHC, our projects seek to highlight the topics and people traditional academic history has often left behind. In seeking to create a more inclusive material record of the past, the PHC is undertaking a rather radical project.

 

Who Does Radical Public History?

Radical public history is produced by everyone who desires a more inclusive understanding of the past in order to ensure a more just future.  Public history is done as individual and collective undertakings. Anytime the public undertakes to remember something and put it in some sort of record, public history results.  So too does public history exist at the coaxing of professionals in a variety of communities. Thus, public history may appear in museums or in traditional archival settings, but it also exists in community archive spaces, in the stories told and recorded within families, in the box of family memorabilia donated to an organization for safe keeping and posterity. Public history projects are quite likely to be produced by folks who see their work as a form of political practice in that they are restoring a record that is incomplete. Are you doing radical public history? What are your favorite radical public history projects? Please share with us by email @ -  phc@arizona.edu.

 

 

A Radical Public History Project Could be...