Sunday, January 20, 2013

Week One: The Hatfields and McCoys

In addition to my M.A., I am working on a graduate certificate in Heritage Education. While I have completed all but the thesis for my M.A., I still have one course required for my Heritage Ed. certificate, which I am taking this semester. As one of the requirements for this course, each student is required to keep a weekly reading blog, with entries pertaining to our readings. Because I already have this blog, and because the requirements for these posts are so broad, meaning I can make most of them interesting to a lot of people outside of my class, I have decided to go ahead and post them here. I'm actually looking forward to the opportunity to do more blogging this semester. I may post some entries not related to my class, as I always do, but I'll have at least one per week from my class. I suppose we shall see how this goes!

For our first class, we were assigned to read the first two essays from the book, Public History: Essays from the Field, edited by James B. Gardner and Peter S. LaPaglia.

In her essay, "Becoming a Public Historian," Constance B. Schulz spends most of her time looking at how a person becomes a public historian and how public history as a legitimate subset within the field of history has developed over the last several decades. Interestingly enough, public history has only been recognized as a legitimate field since the 1970s. Before that, very few historians who went on to graduate school ever intended to work outside of the academe. Most of the historians who found themselves working in museums or historical sites, or otherwise working outside of a university setting, only did so after they failed to find jobs within universities. Public history (which had not yet received its name) was seen as a last resort for failed academic historians. Working outside of the academe was viewed as second-best.

Finally, in the mid-1970s, a few universities began developing graduate programs (almost exclusively within history departments) specifically to train public or "applied" historians. Not only did the students in these programs study academic history and learn to study, write, and research as an academic historian, but they also received formal training in working with museums, archives, and many other public history venues. At long last, the academe was "legitimizing" public history. Well, kind of.

Patricia Mooney-Melvin focuses on the ongoing tension between academic and public historians in her essay, "Professional Historians and the Challenge of Redefinition." When I arrived at Southeast Missouri State University two years ago, I had a B.A. in history, and absolutely zero idea of what "public history" is. I'd never even heard the term. It was not long, however, that I learned that public history is simply presenting history to the public, in one way or another, whether it be through museums, archives, documentaries, newspaper articles, historic preservation, or something else. I thought, "well that's cool, but I don't want to be one." My passion is academic history. And that's where my thoughts on the matter ended. Then I had a rude awakening.

There is an ongoing, decades-old, cold war raging between many public historians and academic historians. Um. Why? That's an excellent question. But I suppose that asking such a question about this issue will do little more good than asking what exactly it was that began the famous feud between the Hatfields and McCoys. I'm not sure anyone really has a good answer to that.

Mooney-Melvin's essay got me thinking though. She argues that the term "historian" should be redefined (though I'm not sure it was ever really defined well to begin with), in an effort to help include both public and academic history, which would then help bridge the gap between the two, and foster a more cooperative relationship between public and academic historians. This is not a bad idea, by any means. However, I can't figure out why there would be any tension between academic and public historians. In my opinion, the two are highly inter-dependent, and the two disciplines should be mutually inclusive, not mutually exclusive, as some would like to make them.

In her essay, Mooney-Melvin talked about many academic historians who would love nothing more than for their work to be used solely by other academics. What a waste. Yes, I said it. To me, that's  no different than a brilliant research doctor saying he only wants his discoveries used by other research doctors. They may cure cancer, but never make it available to the public. How is it any different for a historian's life work to be used only by other historians? Sure, the application of history may be less life-saving than the application of cancer research, but it is no less important to the future of society.

I don't want to make my living full-time as a public historian, but I do want my research and work to allow me to be of some use in making this world a better place. I study African-American history, and right now, my main focus has been slavery and abolition, but I've also studied many other topics within African-American history. It is impossible for me to count the number of times people I know have asked for my help, as a historian of African-American history, on things ranging from how to raise their kids to be truly colorblind in terms of race, to asking me to step in and help mediate a raging online fight having to do with a racial issue. It has been my privilege to be able to do a lot of practical good as an individual historian in these matters. No, doing things like mediating an argument about race, or trying to get through to someone who has been raised in a culture of racial prejudice, are not by any means fun. I often feel as though I'm being handed a ticking bomb and told to deactivate it. Um, no thanks. But I also do know that this kind of work is important- vital even- if we are to improve as a society at all. As a historian, I realize that we rarely do more than trade one set of evils for another, but as humans, our goal should be to always better ourselves, and better society, whether we end up succeeding or not. We have made great strides as far as racial equality goes, but we have a very long way to go, and if I was to spend my life studying African-American history and never use any of what I learned to make a practical difference in this area, that would be a profound waste.

Not only do I personally want to make a difference, but I'm glad to know there are public historians out there who can take my research and writings, and interpret them for the public. They can take my work and make it practically accessible and understandable to non-historians. Conversely, I am able to spend time researching certain topics on a level that a public historian simply cannot do, because they're too busy doing other tasks.

I realize, as these two essays point out, that there is definitely a rift between the public and academic history communities, but there absolutely should not be. Both subsets are vitally important to society, and absolutely inter-dependent. Without public historians, academic historians would be useless. Without academic historians, public historians wouldn't have enough information to present to the public. Both sides are desperately needed.

To put it bluntly, both sides need to get over themselves and realize they can happily work together, rather than constantly bickering and demeaning the other side. Really, how is this any better than the Hatfields and McCoys?








No comments:

Post a Comment