This document discusses the differences between academic, public, and popular history. It defines each field and their intended audiences. Academic historians aim to create new knowledge and publish in peer-reviewed journals, targeting other academics. Public historians interpret history for broader understanding, working with museums and media. Popular historians entertain and tell compelling narratives, targeting general audiences. The fields can overlap and influence each other. Historians must consider audience when selecting topics and communicating research in various forms appropriate to each field.

1. Academic, Public and Popular
History
Associate Professor Michelle Arrow,
Macquarie University
Headstart to Extension 2015

2. Outline
1. Defining the fields and their purposes
2. Who are their intended audiences?
3. How do different historians communicate?
4. Controversies
5. An ANZAC case study

3. But first….
All historians are interested in the ‘whole human past’
(Curthoys and McGrath, How to Write History that People
Want to Read)
History is ‘a continuous process of interaction between the
historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the
present and the past.’
(E.H. Carr, What is History?)
Histories will differ according to their purpose and audience…

4. And also…
• Academic, Public and Popular history are
discrete categories
• BUT – they also overlap
• Many historians work across these categories
as well as within them
• Many academic historians conduct analysis of
popular histories
• Public history is an academic discipline as well
as a practice

5. What is Academic History?
• Academic historians aim to create new
knowledge about the past – to innovate, to push
the discipline further
• They seek to construct historical interpretations
or arguments about the past
– New archival sources
– Application of new theories to the past (eg
postcolonial, gender etc)
– New approaches to the kinds of sources used (eg
social history, cultural history, gender history)

6. Defining Academic History
• Academic historians take part in a scholarly
conversation with historians, both past and present
• Publishing in specialised, peer-reviewed outlets –
academic journals, scholarly presses
• What does ‘peer-review’ mean? – evaluation of
academic work by others working in the same field
• See this explainer:
https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-peer-
review-27797
• (Windschuttle – did not submit work to peer review)

7. Some academic historians
Prof Joan Beaumont, Prof
Marilyn Lake, Prof Bill Gammage

8. What is Public History?
• Public historians seek to interpret the past for broader
public understanding, usually with an emphasis on primary
sources and especially material culture
• Public history involves historical research, analysis and
presentation ‘with some degree of explicit application to
the needs of contemporary life’ (The Public Historian
editorial policy)
• National Council of Public History (USA): ‘public history
describes the many and diverse ways in which history is put
to work in the world’ http://ncph.org/what-is-public-
history/about-the-field/

9. • Hilda Kean ‘public history [is] … a practice which has the
capacity for involving people as well as nations and
communities in the creation of their own histories.’
(The Public History Reader, Kean and Martin (eds) 2013)
• ‘Public history not only reflects the history of the
community it seeks to serve, but the very history of that
community will shape the nuances of what is understood as
public history by that community.’ (Dr Robin McLachlan)
http://www.publichistory.org/what_is/definition.html

10. • ”[Michael Frisch] contends that what differentiates public
history from academic history is its focus on audience."
(Stephen L. Reckon, "Doing Public History: A Look at the How, but Especially
the Why," American Quarterly Volume 45, Issue 1 (March 1993): 188.)
• Public historians work with and for the general public.
• Public history is still underpinned by historical research but
its audience is wider than academic history
• public historians work in museums, galleries, archives
interpretive sites, commemorative plaques, reenactments,
heritage assessments, the media (documentaries etc), and
public policy.

11. Some Public Historians
Lorena Allam,
Dr Lisa Murray,
Dr Stephen Gapps

12. What is Popular History?
• The forms and practices through which history is transmitted in culture
(Jerome de Groot), often via popular culture
• Can take a huge variety of forms – political discourse can be a form of
popular history, everyday understandings of the past are a form of popular
history
• Is much more driven by interests of the audience (hence dominance of
military history as a subject of popular histories)
• Popular histories can be commodities – part of a history ‘marketplace’:
popular history books (including those for children), docudramas,
historical films, novels, videogames, documentaries, television programs
(including reality TV eg. 1940s house), experiences, social media eg
facebook pages

13. Defining Popular History
• Probably the place where most people find out about the
past: history as entertainment, history as leisure
• Popular history is history that seeks first to entertain, to tell
compelling narratives about the past for a broad audience
• ‘Popular history is history, simply in a different form to that
of its academic counterparts’. Elizabeth Norton,
http://www.historymatters.group.shef.ac.uk/popular-vs-
academic-history/
• Where are the limits of this category?

14. Some popular historians
Peter Fitzsimons,
Peter Weir
Clare Wright (a rare
academic historian who
‘crosses over’ into
public and popular
realms)

15. 2. Who are their audiences?
2.1. Academic Historians
• Academic Historians: most seek to speak to other
academics; publish in journals (available only through
subscriptions); audiences for their books tend to be small
(500-2000 copies)
• Historians publish in different journals depending on who
they want to ‘speak’ to
• Selecting your topic means you are selecting your audience
• Some communicate their work more broadly: as expert
‘taking heads’ for the media, writing for websites that
‘translate’ academic research like theconversation.com
(see: https://theconversation.com/au/topics/writing-
history)

16. Results from the surveys Australians and the Past (Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, published in ACH: Australian Cultural History 22,
2003) and The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, 1998 Colombia
University Press)
Historical activities undertaken by participants
in the last 12 months (could list more than one)
US Aust
Looked at photographs with family or friends 91% 88%
Taken photographs or videos to preserve
memories
83 74
Watched movies or television programs about
the past
81 84
Attended family/school reunion 64 56
Visited museums or historic sites 57 55
Read books about the past 53 56
Participated in hobbies relating to the past 39 33
Conducted genealogical research 36 69
Written a journal or diary 29 25
Participated in a group devoted to studying or
preserving the past
20 15

17. Results from the surveys Australians and the Past (Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, published in ACH: Australian Cultural History 22,
2003) and The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, 1998 Colombia
University Press)
Trustworthiness of sources of information
about the past
Aust (%)
Museums 56
Academic historians 33
Family stories 23
Non-fiction books 20
Eye-witnesses 16
newspapers 15
High-school teachers 14
Historical movies/TV 12
Radio programs 7
Media figures 3
Politicians -39 (!)

18. 2.2 Public Historians
• Public Historians: audiences include the general public,
government, policy advisors, community groups,
children, schools, parents.
• Accountability is slightly different – most public
historians work for governments, cultural institutions
dependent on government funding, or commissions
• Public historians have to demonstrate they are
reaching certain audiences (and generating new ones)
to guarantee funding, etc

19. 2.3 Popular Historians
• Popular Historians seek to communicate to a
general audience, but perhaps in more emotional
ways than public historians
• Popular historians want to engage with story-
telling, to inspire passion, anger, nationalism,
sentimentality
• Many popular histories are aimed at audiences
often neglected by academic histories: family
historians, women, children

20. 3. How do these historians
communicate?
3.1 Academic historians
• Academic historians: primarily though the written
word. Writing tends to be formal, favours
argument over engaging emotions, footnotes!
• Academic historians also write newspaper
articles, give public lectures and conference
papers, and teach to communicate their research

21. Academic histories

22. 3.2. Public Historians
• Public Historians can communicate their work in
a range of forms: apps, walking tours, public
lectures, radio features, museum displays,
interpretations of historical artefacts, public
programs, live tweeting historical events (eg.
#Dismissal1975), events (eg Jacqui Newling @
Sydney Living Museums ‘the cook and the
curator’ blog
http://blogs.hht.net.au/cook/about/ )
• usually connected to institutions in some way

23. Public histories

24. 3.3. Popular Historians
• Popular historians: can communicate through non-
fiction and fiction (and tend to blur the lines between
the two)
• Popular history events like ‘Camp Gallipoli’ –
communicating an historical narrative
• Popular historical narratives appear in many places in
our culture, from film, television, social media, books
for children, history ‘blockbusters’ (eg Peter Fitzsimons
has sold more than 250 000 copies of his book Kokoda)

25. Popular histories

26. 4. Controversies
• Some suspicion and resentment exists between
academic, public and popular historians – but all
are locked in a symbiotic relationship
• Historical understanding in Australia is produced
by the interplay between public, popular and
academic history (as ‘Australians and the Past’
survey, and Anna Clark’s work on ‘ordinary
people’s history’ shows)

27. Points of debate
• Does popular history ‘dumb down’ history, reducing the
past’s complexity for the sake of entertainment?
• Does it reduce the past to a set of tidy stories rather than
uncomfortable truths?
• Does it mislead audiences through falsifying the past (eg.
historical films)?
• (for a critique of popular history see:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/aug/26
/history.celebrity)
• A great critique of The Imitation Game
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/20/the-
imitation-game-invents-new-slander-to-insult-alan-turing-
reel-history

28. Points of debate
• Yet – public and popular histories can
introduce an audience to the past, and make
them curious to discover more (which might
bring audiences to academic and public
histories)
• They can resonate in a charged political
moment and raise awareness of the history of
present day injustice (eg Selma, Rabbit Proof
Fence, The Secret River)

29. R: Scene from Selma (2015)
Below: students from Howard
University protest the shooting
death of Michael Brown at the
hands of police in Ferguson,
Missouri, August 2014
http://www.hlntv.com/article/2014/08/14/ferguson-dont-shoot-
howard-university
http://blacklivesmatter.com
Amy Davidson on Selma
http://www.newyorker.com/ne
ws/amy-davidson/selma-fair-l-b-
j?mbid=social_facebook

30. Academic and Popular Histories
• Popular historians are often subject of scorn and criticism from academics
and vice versa
• Popular histories are usually built on the work of academic historians
• Paul Ham: ‘’Let us not assume, of course, that academic historians want
their work to be read. Many do not. Many seem to harbour an abhorrence
of mass approval. To be popular in certain ivory towers is the kiss of death.
They have little to fear in this regard. The deadening verbosity and
sprawling sentences of the worst examples of academic writing render
them incomprehensible to the mortal reader.[…] most academic historians
presume to judge popular history as if they know best, and almost always
according to their faculty's standards.’
• http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/human-factors-20140320-
353nd.html

31. Academic and Popular Histories
• Academic historian Paula Michaels:
• ‘the path of popular history is closed to most historians
because of the very subjects of their investigation. No
amount of finesse with the written word would have
put my first book, on the history of medicine and
public health in Soviet Kazakhstan, on the shelves of
Dymock’s. The publishing of popular history is driven
not by how scholars write, but by what readers are
willing to buy.’
• https://theconversation.com/what-is-academic-
history-for-24795

32. 5. An ANZAC case study
• Historians are interested in public and popular
histories for the meanings they attach to the
past (and then to see people’s reactions)
• Anzac day this year offered a chance to
observe this process up close…

38. Anzac Live, social media avatars
communicating their experiences in ‘real
time’

42. ANZAC 2015
• How did all of these competing forms of history
produce the meaning of Anzac Day 2015?
• Australians sharply rejected what they perceived
to be attempts to commercialise Anzac (Zoo
Weekly, Camp Gallipoli, ‘Fresh in our memories’
etc)
• Also failed to watch the drama series that offered
new takes on the Gallipoli story (compared to
Weir’s Gallipoli – his film has set the template)

43. ANZAC 2015
• Yet people turned out in record numbers to Dawn
services and marches
• Academic historians raised questions about our
obsession with Gallipoli and these were given
voice in documentary productions
• Many historians suggest that our affection for
Anzac is closely tied to family history, to the
emotional meaning of the day (fed by popular
histories)
• Social media avatars etc fostered emotional
connections with the past

44. • Public, popular and academic histories play very different
roles in our culture
• All produce different kinds of historical meaning and
understanding (we should try to work out what kinds of
understanding they produce, and on their own terms)
• Academic historians contribute to these fields in many
different ways
• The intellectual advances of academic historians do shift
popular understandings of history – but it can take a long
time!
• Academic historians need to be able to communicate with
different audiences – but not always and not necessarily at
the same time

45. Questions?
I am happy to email a copy of these slides to you if you
are interested (just be sure to attribute them correctly if
you use them) –
Email:
Michelle.Arrow@mq.edu.au
My research & teaching profile:
http://www.mq.edu.au/about_us/faculties_and_departm
ents/faculty_of_arts/mhpir/staff/staff/dr_michelle_arrow
/

46. Further Reading:
• Jerome de Groot, Consuming History (2009)
• Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath, How to Write
History that People want to Read (2009)
• Hilda Kean and Paul Martin, The Public History
Reader (2013)
• Anna Clark ‘Ordinary people’s history’, History
Australia, 9 (1), 2012
• Jorma Kalela, Making History: the Historian
and Uses of the Past (2012)