HIST2312 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Environmental Psychology, Studs Terkel, Oral History
Week 8 HIST Lecture – Public and Personal History: words and memories
Public history:
• Coined in the 1970 – conservation, museum, family or community history research, film and
tv, library or galleries
• All engaged in history work
• Around for hundreds of years before empirical histories tried to make a new form
• Social knowledge before the academic field
• Non-academic historians – folklorist, antiquarians
• Often a very immediate, tangible but a romantic idea of the past
Books:
• Defined key questions
• The Past is a Foreign Country – Lowenthal (environmental psychology, how they used the
past in the past)
• Project romantic myths onto the past
• Deial ad ottage-approah aed
• Amateur history compared to academic history
• Kind of underbelly of history
• Theatres of Memory – Samuel
• Prone to theoretical methods – the tea-roo iage
• Measures change
Public History:
• Non-academic history – outside the academy
• Any way, shape or form outside of the academic field
• Answers the question of what is history different to the historian
• Genuine sub-set of the historical practise
• Pure siee – applied siee odel
• Emphasis on use and utility
• Undertaken collaboratively
• Deals with popular and public memory
• History as a social form of knowledge
• Not large aspect questions
• In the nature of folk memory to embellish
• Bringing professional ethics to the community (usually a lot of embellishment and
misrepresentation)
Historians:
• Graeme Davison – The Use and Abuse of Australian History (5 phases of the prehistory, local
history making)
• Pioeer, patriarhal, professioal, preseratioist, ouity, plae history
• Glossy history – more important for the image of the community than the actual facts
• Empowering the community in order for community to develop own sense of local
knowledge
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com