Stonehenge: set in twentieth-
century concrete |
MORE THAN 50 MILLION people worldwide tried to log on to the website for the 1901 census record between 9am and midnight, on the day it went live. Inevitably it crashed and was closed down. It is in this context of immense popular interest in history that the third Public History Conference will be held at Ruskin College, Oxford, in May.
Public history can be usefully defined as ‘the engagement with history now’. It looks at the way that we acquire our sense of the past, whether that be through studying archives, or through memory, landscape, or the material culture in which we live. It is concerned with how the past is represented to audiences, whether through broadcast media, museums or monuments, popular fiction or biography.
The great rise in interest in history in recent years has included a growth in the number of visits to heritage sites, museums and art galleries; the phenomenal rise in the number of people undertaking family and local history research; and the increasing popularity of history on television and radio a satellite television channel is now devoted to the subject. There is, however, a gulf between this popular interest and the academic study of history, in which the written word is given pride of place, and visual (and verbal) materials are held in comparatively low esteem. While historians have generally been ready to make programmes, and pronounce on them, they have been less than eager to acknowledge the information they provide as useful to their work. Public history attempts to bridge this gulf, and to enrich our understanding of the past by widening our sources of information.
Public historians are as ready to study the magazine racks of WHSmith as to read academic texts; commercial packaging, television advertising or the internet are all useful sources of evidence. Likewise, the family photograph album, the personal diary and our own observations in the street are as valid as research in archives and libraries. Yet, though they challenge the idea that only books are ‘serious’, and are committed to widening audience access, they stress the importance of high standards of scholarship.
Some idea of the scope of public history can be gathered from the programme of last year’s public history conference. Brian Edwards discussed the forgotten rebuilding of Stonehenge in the modern era, and Mike Marqusee recounted the amazing response he had to his book on Muhammad Ali from listeners to black community radio stations in the USA. One presentation looked at the attempts to de-stigmatise the Marlborough Union Workhouse as it was turned into luxury flats; another told the story of a search for the non-white servicemen who participated in the second World War.
The construction, and purpose, of Stonehenge have been the subject of intense archaeological and amateur debate for many years. Less discussed is the work of engineers who set the stones upright in twentieth-century concrete. Brian Edwards described the similar fate of Stonehenge’s near neighbour: what people have come to recognise as prehistoric Avebury the vast circle and avenue of stones was erected in the 1930s by the marmalade heir Alexander Keiller. Before that time most of the stones had either been buried by farmers and superstitious churchgoers, or used by local people as building materials. The publication of his research has made Brian Edwards unpopular with certain custodians of our national heritage.
As well as revisiting official histories, the public historian is concerned with the veil of nostalgia that popular memory can sometimes draw across the past. Take the way that the English have romanticised Sciurus Vulgaris, the indigenous but now rarely seen red squirrel. As Hilda Kean told last year’s conference, although it now appears as an icon of the countryside, and is used as a National Trust emblem, it was once seen very differently. Before the 1914-18 war there were so many red squirrels that gun clubs were formed specifically to deal with the problem. It was even recommended as a flavoursome wartime dish whose ‘piney’ flavour was, the recipe said, drawn from its diet of conifers. Public history gets the true flavour of the past!
Dave Reeves is a writer who works with communities to produce and publish their own histories. He is currently completing an MA in Public History at Ruskin College, Oxford. |
