What Is Public History Globally? ― Working With the Past in the Present

Across the globe, history has gone public. With the rise of the internet, family historians are now delving into archives continents apart. Activists look into and recreate the past to promote social justice or environmental causes. Dark and difficult pasts are confronted at sites of commemoration. Artists draw on memory and the past to study the human condition and make meaning in the present. As a result of this democratisation of history, public history movements have now risen to prominence.

This groundbreaking edited collection takes a comprehensive look at public history throughout the world. Divided into three sections - Background, Definitions and Issues; Approaches and Methods; and Sites of Public History - it contextualises public history in eleven different countries, explores the main research skills and methods of the discipline and illustrates public history research with a variety of global case studies.

What is Public History Globally? provides an in-depth examination of the ways in which ordinary people become active participants in historical processes and it will be an invaluable resource for advance undergraduates and postgraduates studying public history, museology and heritage studies.

Paul Ashton is an Adjunct at the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, which he co-founded, the Centre for Applied History at Macquarie University and the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra. His publications include Once Upon a Time: Australian Writers on Using the Past (2016) and Australian History Now (2013). He is also founding co-editor of the journal Public History Review.

Alex Trapeznik is Associate Professor of History at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research focuses on historical and cultural heritage management issues in New Zealand and globally. He is the author of Common Ground? Heritage and Public Places in New Zealand (2000), a key text that helped establish public history as a discipline in New Zealand.