Prof Julia Laite provides an introduction to her journey to public history, and the purposes of the Public History Now Network.

Like so many others who are part of the What is Public History Now? network, I stumbled my way into Public History. I’d long been interested in the communication and making of history outside the academy, of course, and had done a lot of policy engagement work through my research on sexual labour and trafficking. I had worked with community-based historians and many galleries, museums and archives during my Directorship of the Raphael Samuel History Centre. I was also working on a trade non-fiction book, so I was thinking about popular history, historical fiction, and historical narrative. But my crash course in public history really began when Birkbeck launched its Public Histories MA program, and I became its coordinator.

I quickly learned that the questions I had going in–What exactly is public history, and am I a public historian?—were active and important ones that the field itself was still asking. And as I began to ask these—and other—questions with my public history students, we learned together.

Something else became readily apparent: the rapid and recent growth of Public History in UK academia.  Birkbeck’s Public Histories MA was one of around fifteen new Public History MA programmes established between 2010 and the present, in addition to a flourishing of new public history BA programmes, public history modules, and public history centres and institutes.  This was remarkable. While the UK certainly has a rich tradition of local and community history, history workshops, and history-in-public, it lagged significantly behind the US, Australia and Canada in translating these practices into academic programmes. The first Public History programme in the United States was founded in the 1970s, whereas the path-breaking programme in public history at Ruskin College was not founded until 1996. 

What might explain the rise and rise of public history programmes in the UK? The answer almost certainly lies in a confluence of different factors.  The ‘history wars’, which have reached fever pitch in the UK in recent years, have certainly made the practice of history in public more urgent and more challenging. The rise of social media, which has collapsed the space between the US (et al) and UK academy—as well as between historian within and without the academy– might be another reason. The reconfiguring of the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector, which seeks, more and more, to engage and include the public, is part of this sea change. And of course some of what we are seeing is a rebranding as ‘Public History’ of very established practices of community, local, popular, and ‘people’s’ history within UK universities. 

With these questions in mind, I applied to the AHRC Research Networking grant programme and was successful.  Over the course of the year—at the tail end of Covid restrictions—a large and diverse number of public historians came together to discuss the nature and scope and future of public history programmes in UK universities, how these programmes relate to and interact with the wider public history sector, and what, ultimately, we thought Public History should and could be.   We met in two online workshops and a final conference, and then the team and I put together this website, in order to allow those who couldn’t attend to be able to engage with our discussions. We see this as a beginning, rather than the end, of networked conversations about Public History in the UK!