Posts com a Tag ‘KEAN Hilda (Ed)’

KEAN, Hilda; MARTIN, Paul (Ed). The Public History Reader. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2013. Resenha  de: FOSTER, Meg. Public History Review, v.21, p.102-104, 2014.

When confronted with the question, ‘what is public history?” many students and practitioners alike find themselves struggling for answers. Is it ‘the employment of historians and historical method outside of academia’, as Robert Kelley famously declared in The Public Historian? Perhaps it describes ‘practices that communicate and engage with history in public areas’, as Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton assert in their book History at The Crossroads? Following Raphael Samuel, does it refer to an ever changing, social process, the work at any one time of ‘a thousand different hands?’ As Paul Ashton has written in the Public History Review (2010), ‘Public history is an elastic, nuanced and contentious term. Its meaning has changed over time and across cultures in different local, regional, national and international contexts.’ Even the leading body of public history in America, the National Council of Public History (NCPH), has been forced to confront this issue. In their introduction to the subject, ‘What is Public History?’, the NCPH argues that the most apt definition is perhaps the simplest; people should know public history when they see it. For students who are relatively unexposed to the area, and for public historians who are faced with the ever-changing contours of their field, even this description is inadequate. Hilda Kean and Paul Martin’s recent collection The Public History Reader helps to address this uncertainty. In an accessible and engaging way, this book shows readers some of public history’s many faces. Leia Mais