Forty years ago, on May 2, 1980, the National Council on Public History (NCPH) came into official existence when it filed articles of incorporation in Washington, D.C. Leading public historians created this new professional organization to expand and explore what was then a new field. The development of the field itself, in the years before NCPH’s founding, owed an enormous amount to a close partnership between the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and historians at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
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What IS Public History?
On one level, public history is simply history that is consumed by the public outside of the classroom. But on another level, it can be seen as a distinct profession within the field of history. The University of California at Santa Barbara’s (UCSB) History Department today defines public history as a profession “to train historians for public and private sector careers beyond conventional academic employment.” Similarly, the NCPH defines the field as history at work, or history “applied to real-world issues.”
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New Uses for History
Why was a new distinction necessary by the 1970s? Historians had worked in non-academic settings for decades before the formalization of the public history field. Yet the creation of the NCPH, along with the development of the field across many sites and institutions, allowed government bodies, local historians, archivists, historic preservationists, museum professionals, historical consultants, documentarians, and others to collaborate. Furthermore, it empowered them to engage with societal issues under an umbrella with a clear concept and shared understanding.
Naming the field helped establish professional and intellectual identity. At the time, a job shortage loomed over newly minted academic historians. It worsened each year as more PhD degrees were awarded than new university posts were available. Therefore, historians sought to mobilize their academic training in new ways.
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A Potential Partner
At its founding in 1913, the RF had not concerned itself with the humanities; in fact, it focused as tightly as it could on professionalizing medical education and fostering what was at that time also a new field — public health. But as the twentieth century went on, the RF expanded its endeavors, and developed a growing interest in the humanities. It first established a Humanities Division in 1928.
A few decades later, in 1963, academic divisions such as “humanities” and “social sciences” were abandoned at the RF in favor of organizing work into multi-disciplinary, thematic areas, for example “Toward the Conquest of Hunger” or “Aiding Our Cultural Development.” The RF hoped that such a multi-disciplinary approach might bring more relevance to its work on the complex social issues of the 1960s.