Doing Public History

Vipul Singh | Speaking History, no.1, 2026

Abstract: Public history brings the past into everyday life. It shows how history is made and understood beyond classrooms, journals and archives, in cafe, on streets, in monuments, through YouTube podcast and blogs, through memory, and heritage walk.

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Photo 1: 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. Most people do not meet history through academic arguments or footnotes. They meet it through stories, symbols and memories. History exists in shared social spaces. People encounter the past everywhere, from museums and monuments to films and social media. These are all spaces where history is created, debated, and remembered.

At its heart, public history asks a simple question: how does history live in public life? In other words, it brings the past into everyday life, and shows how history is understood in cafe, on streets, through YouTube podcast and blogs, through memory and heritage walk.

History without historians

Historians are trained experts. Yet many popular representations of the past are created without them. Majority of the people learn history through YouTube, commercial films, television series, political speeches, or social media forwards. 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

History was connected to the public for time immemorial and was orally transmitted from one generation to the next. It was never meant only for scholars. Stories from the past circulated among the common people. History in that sense shaped people’s identity and belonging. Gradually, the rulers began to get their deeds recorded by court chroniclers for the glorification of their ruling dynasty. This changed the very nature of writing and understanding history.

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. Nation-states asked people to identify themselves with shared pasts. Stories of origin, heroes, and sacrifice helped bind people of the together. Monuments were built and glorified. National days were created and ceremonies were repeated year after year. History was basically fixed into public life in visible ways. It is from here on that history became more professional and specialised. Writing became technical and but much of what was being written was in national interest.

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. He asked historians to show the past ‘as it actually happened’. This approach gave history authority, but it also encouraged faith in objectivity and clear historical causality. Historians began to insert footnotes as evidence. This confidence in factual evidence as the core of history was soon questioned. Friedrich Nietzsche warned that excessive reliance on history could drain life of meaning and power. He challenged linear causality. He argued that history based on recorded evidence simplifies reality into clean narratives, but real life is far more complex. These ideas influenced later historians such as Marc Bloch, who argued for a 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 climate.

Despite the Annales intervention, much of the academic history remained under Rankean influence. Historians still relied heavily on archives and primary sources. Over time, a gap developed between academic history and popular audiences. This gap is often described as the “ivory tower.” So, 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 and everyday experience of the common people. 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, speaks to children, tourists and common people who may never have studied history formally.

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: Raikas

One way of doing public history, for example, 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 (also known as Rebaris) of Rajasthan offers a clear example of public history in practice.

Photo 2: Raikas 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 laws disrupted these movements. Grazing lands were enclosed and their mobility was restricted. The post-colonial state continued many of these policies in the name of conservation and development.

In modern times, Raika mobility is often seen as a problem- as encroachment and damage to the crops. But Raika oral histories tell a different story. They speak of remembered routes and wells that no longer exist. Oral traditions indicate that, in the pre-colonial period, Raika pastoralists were integrated into agrarian economies through circulatory migration. They were invited by village communities to graze their herds on agricultural lands. Their manure sustained soil fertility.

These memories are not folklore. They are historical knowledge. Much of this history does not exist in state archives. It exists in conversation of the Raika and their still practiced act of circulatory migration across landscapes. If historians rely only on official documents, these histories may disappear. Public history demands that historians listen to communities. We treat oral memory as historical evidence and recognise lived experience as a source. History here is not only about their distant past. It is about survival in the present.

Raika memories often clash with official narratives of environmental protection. Village lands remembered as shared commons are redefined as restricted zones. Their mobility is reframed as threat to private properties. Public history helps make these tensions visible. It shows how such mobile patoralists remember the same landscape differently. It explains why history based on archives and chronicles excluded them and still shapes their present inequality.

The story of the Raikas remind us that history is not always written. Sometimes it is remembered through memories. Public history allows such histories to be heard in public. 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?

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 equipped to practise public history responsibly. They can easily combine scholarly method with public engagement.

Doing public history begins with stepping outside the archive and listening to public. It requires historians to engage with people, places, and memories where the past is already alive. They have to interact with communities and understand how different audiences understand the past. Historians have to translate the rigours of research into clear language that is comprehensible to larger public. It means using multiple forms, walks, exhibitions, writing, conversations, and digital media, without giving up evidence or context.

Many historians argue that public history weakens the rigour of the discipline. I see it differently. Public history grounds the past in the lived world. It takes history beyond the classroom and into everyday life. It makes the past accessible to more people. Public history does not require historians to give up serious research and writing. It offers an additional tool. This is specially important when historical narratives are increasingly shaped outside the discipline.

References:

1. Ashton, Paul, and Alex Trapeznik, eds. What Is Public History Globally? London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
2. Bernd Faulenbach and Falko Schnicke, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Public History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
3. Bloch, Marc. The Historian’s Craft. Indian edition. Delhi: Aakar Books, 2017.
4. Kean, Hilda, and Paul Martin, eds. The Public History Reader. London: Routledge, 2013.
5. Singh, Vipul. “Environmental Migration as Planned Livelihood Among the Rebaris of Western Rajasthan, India.” Global Environment 9 (2012): 50–73.
6. Cauvin, Thomas. Public History: A Textbook of Practice. London: Routledge, 2022.

How to cite

Singh, Vipul. “Doing Public History.”  Speaking History (2026), no. 1.