Introduction: People and their Pasts and Public History Today

Abstract

The first international public history conference was held in Britain at Ruskin College, Oxford, in September 2005, with the title ‘People and their Pasts ’.² In earlier years Ruskin public history conferences had covered a range of topics including official and unofficial histories, personal and public histories, placing history and seeing history. All emphasised the processes by which histories are created. At the same time, some recent university conferences in Britain had been held with the titles of ‘Historians and their Publics’ or ‘History and the Public’ in which the stress had been on communicating history as a given body of knowledge by academically trained historians to ‘the public’.³ Such frameworks concentrate on the form and nature of transmission, rather than explore the idea of how the past becomes history. However, the ‘People and the Pasts’ conference had a different emphasis. It sought to explore the range of historiographical processes that could lead to the possible creation of shared meaning and different understandings of the past between people with a keen interest in the role of the past in the present. This lively sharing of ideas and projects at the conference was the starting point for putting this collection of essays together.

… history is not the prerogative of the historian … It is, rather, a social form of knowledge; the work in a given instance, of a thousand different hands …¹