Public history brings the past into everyday life. It shows how history is made and understood beyond classrooms and archives, in cafe, on streets, in monuments, through YouTube podcast, through memory, heritage walk and in public debate.
Image: Heritage Walk at Chittorgarh Fort
What Is Public History?
Public history is an approach to the past that takes history beyond classrooms, archives, and academic journals. It reminds us that history does not belong only to universities or professional historians. History exists in shared social spaces. At its heart, public history asks a simple question: how does history live in public life?
People encounter the past everywhere. In museums and memorials. In courts and school textbooks. In podcasts, films, blogs, and social media. On streets, in laws, and in everyday conversations. These are all spaces where history is created, debated, and remembered. Most people do not meet history through academic arguments or footnotes. They meet it through stories, symbols, claims, and memories. Public history helps us understand how these encounters shape public thinking and collective identity.
History without historians
Historians are trained experts. Yet many popular representations of the past are created without them. Millions explore family history through genealogy websites. Others learn history through films, television series, political speeches, or online debates. The concern is not whether these practices are right or wrong. The concern is that professional historians are often missing from the most influential spaces where history circulates. When historians are absent, the past can be simplified, misused, or turned into a tool for power. Public history responds to this problem. It asks historians to step into public spaces rather than withdraw from them.
A brief look at how history became academic
Modern academic history developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This happened alongside the rise of the nation-state. History became a trained profession. Evidence, archives, and method became central. Nations needed shared pasts. Stories of origin, heroes, and sacrifice helped bind people together. Monuments were built. National days were created. Ceremonies were repeated year after year. History was fixed into public life in visible ways. This shows something important. From the very beginning, history was connected to the public. It was never meant only for scholars. Even when it claimed objectivity, history played a role in shaping identity and belonging.
As history became more professional, it also became more specialised. Writing became technical. Footnotes increased. Research topics narrowed. Historians mostly wrote for other historians.
By the end of the 19th century, Leopold von Ranke had come to represent a new way of studying the past. History was treated as a scientific discipline, taught in universities and grounded in archives, evidence, and method. This approach gave history authority, but it also encouraged faith in objectivity and clear historical causality. That confidence was soon questioned. Friedrich Nietzsche warned that excessive reliance on history could drain life of meaning and power. He challenged linear causality and moral certainty. These ideas influenced later historians such as Marc Bloch, who argued for a broader history attentive to long-term social and economic processes. In The Historian’s Craft, Bloch helped shape the Annales tradition, which moved history beyond events and rulers toward everyday life and deeper structures.
Over time, a gap developed between academic history and popular audiences. This gap is often described as the “ivory tower.” While historians refined their methods, the public continued to consume history elsewhere. Public history emerges at this point. It is an effort to rebuild the broken connection between historical knowledge and public life.
What public history does
Public history does not reject academic rigour. It depends on it. Good public history is based on careful research and evidence. What changes is the way history is communicated and shared. Public historians think about audiences. They think about language. They think about memory, emotion, and experience. They ask how people make sense of the past in their own lives. A museum exhibition, for example, must speak to children and adults. To tourists and local residents. To people who may never have studied history formally. This requires clarity, sensitivity, and ethical responsibility.
Public history also challenges the idea that memory and history are opposites. Memory is not simply false. History is not purely objective. People remember the past through personal experience. Communities remember through shared stories. These memories shape how historical events are understood. Public history pays attention to this interaction. Listening to local memories can reveal tensions. Official narratives may differ from lived experience. These differences are themselves historically important.
Case Study
One way of doing public history is to understand the past of pastoral communities through the lens of environmental history. Environmental history shows clearly why public history is necessary. Landscapes are not just physical spaces. They are historical spaces. They carry memory, labour, and conflict. Pastoral routes, grazing lands, forests, and water sources are often discussed today as policy problems or ecological zones. But for communities who live with them, these are historical worlds shaped by generations of movement, negotiation, and survival. This is where public history becomes essential.My research on the Raikas of Rajasthan offers a clear example of public history in practice.
Image: Raikas of Rajasthan with their camels
The Raikas are a pastoral community whose lives have long depended on seasonal movement with camels, sheep, and cattle. Their migration routes are not random. They are historical paths shaped by climate, custom, kinship, and access to common lands. Colonial forest laws disrupted these movements. Grazing lands were enclosed. Mobility was restricted. The post-colonial state continued many of these policies in the name of conservation and development.
In official records, Raika mobility often appears as a problem. As encroachment. As backwardness. As environmental damage. But Raika oral histories tell a different story. They speak of remembered routes. Of wells that no longer exist. Of forests once open to shared use. Of agreements made with cultivators and village councils. These memories are not folklore. They are historical knowledge. Much of this history does not exist in state archives. It exists in conversation. In memory. In practice. In the act of moving across landscapes. If historians rely only on official documents, these histories disappear. Public history demands that historians listen to communities. That they treat oral memory as historical evidence. That they recognise lived experience as a source.
In the Raikas’ case, public history emerges in meetings with forest officials, in court petitions over grazing rights, and in conversations about conservation policy. The past is constantly invoked to justify present claims.History here is not about the distant past. It is about survival in the present.Raika memories often clash with official narratives of environmental protection. Forests remembered as shared commons are redefined as restricted zones. Mobility remembered as sustainable practice is reframed as threat.These conflicts are not just environmental. They are historical.
Public history helps make these tensions visible. It shows how different groups remember the same landscape differently. It explains why historical exclusion still shapes present inequality.The Raikas remind us that history is not always written. Sometimes it is walked. Herded. Remembered. Argued for. Public history allows such histories to be heard in public debate. It challenges narrow, archive-only versions of the past. It insists that communities are not just subjects of history, but producers of it.
How to do Public History?
One may say that history is not made only in universities. It is made at the common spaces. In the street, in cafeteria, in television prime time news, in YouTube podcasts. In parliament and protest. In films, monuments, songs, speeches and through heritage walk. It is shaped by both professional historians and ordinary people. By scholarship and by everyday life. Public history recognises this reality. The past is constantly used in public debates. It is used to justify policies. To claim identities. To create divisions or solidarities. In such a world, history cannot remain enclosed within academic walls.
Today, much of public history in India is being written and spoken by non-historians. While this shows strong public interest in the past, it also raises concerns about accuracy, context, and evidence. Trained historians are better positioned to practise public history responsibly, combining scholarly method with public engagement.Doing public history begins with stepping outside the archive and listening. It requires historians to engage with people, places, and memories where the past is already alive. Public history is done by translating research into clear language, by working with communities, and by paying attention to how different audiences understand the past. It means using multiple forms, walks, exhibitions, writing, conversations, and digital media, without giving up evidence or context. Above all, doing public history involves humility: recognising that historical knowledge is shared, negotiated, and shaped through dialogue between scholars and the public.
Public history asks historians to act as scholars and citizens. It asks them to engage, explain, and listen. It keeps historical thinking alive in public life. Public history does not dilute history. It grounds it. It makes the past accessible, responsible, and meaningful for the present.History is made in villages and deserts. On migration routes. In public hearings and protests. In conversations between elders and children.It is made by historians and non-historians alike. Public history recognises this reality. It does not dilute history. It grounds it in lived worlds.
References:
- Ashton, Paul, and Alex Trapeznik, eds. What Is Public History Globally? London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
- Bernd Faulenbach and Falko Schnicke, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Public History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
- Bloch, Marc. The Historian’s Craft. Indian edition. Delhi: Aakar Books, 2017.
- Kean, Hilda, and Paul Martin, eds. The Public History Reader. London: Routledge, 2013.
- Singh, Vipul. “Environmental Migration as Planned Livelihood Among the Rebaris of Western Rajasthan, India.” Global Environment 9 (2012): 50–73.
- Cauvin,Thomas. Public History: A Textbook of Practice. London: Routledge, 2022.
[Total words: 1500]
Vipul Singh
Speaking History 
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