Abstract
The introduction to History, Policy and Public Purpose makes the case that historians should consider government a vital domain for historical practice. Insisting that historical perspective is essential for good policymaking is not compatible with a refusal to engage seriously with the demands and difficulties of practical politics. The introduction outlines the aim of the book to go beyond the model of the external expert translating academic research for policy audiences. The alternative approach proposed is to integrate historical thinking into the policymaking process. Doing so means critically examining assumptions about scholarship and attitudes to history outside the university. Public history has proved a problematic concept and label for such work and Green suggests reimagining it as history with public purpose, an agenda of concern for the whole discipline.
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Notes
- 1.
B. Crick, In Defence of Politics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 62.
- 2.
J. Garland and C. Terry, ‘The 2015 General Election: A Voting System in Crisis.’ (The Electoral Reform Society, 2015).
- 3.
Raphael Sassower has recently challenged the ‘myth of “speaking truth to power” ’ in The Price of Public Intellectuals (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), chapter 1.
- 4.
V. H. Galbraith, An Introduction to the Study of History (London: C. A. Watts & Co., 1964), p. 59.
- 5.
I take and adapt the term ‘public scholarship’ from Karp: I. Karp, ‘Public Scholarship as a Vocation,’ Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 11, no. 3 (2012).
- 6.
J. D. Brewer, ‘The Sociological Imagination and Public Sociology,’ in C. Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. J. Scott and A. Nilsen (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013), pp. 220–21.
- 7.
The most prominently cited text being Robert Hewison’s The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987).
- 8.
J. Lukacs, The Future of History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011).
- 9.
L. King and G. Rivett, ‘Engaging People in Making History: Impact, Public Engagement and the World Beyond the Campus,’ History Workshop Journal (2015).
- 10.
On the cult of the archive: L. Jordanova, History in Practice, 2nd ed. (London: Hodder Arnold, 2006), pp. 161–3.
- 11.
I. Hesketh, ‘ “History Is Past Politics, and Politics Present History”: Who Said It?,’ Notes and Queries 61, no. 1 (2014).
- 12.
K.-G. Faber, ‘The Use of History in Political Debate,’ History and Theory 17, no. 4 (1978), p. 38.
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Green, A.R. (2016). Introduction. In: History, Policy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52086-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52086-9_1
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