MIDDLE TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY

THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC HISTORY:

NEW THOUGHTS, NEW IDEAS & NEW PRACTICES

PAPER PRESENTED TO

DR. REBECCA CONARD

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF

THE REQUIREMENTS FOR

HISTORY 6510/7510: SEMINAR IN PUBLIC HISTORY

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

BY

ALBERT C. WHITTENBERG

MURFREESBORO, TN

OCTOBER 3, 2006
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Famed frontier historian, Fredrick Jackson Turner, once wrote that “wherever

there remains a chipped flint, a spearhead, a piece of pottery, a pyramid, a picture, a

poem, a coliseum, or a coin, there is history.”1 Taken from the 1890s, this statement

showed a fundamental change in the way history was being viewed. Before men like

Turner, history was the written word found in letters, manuscripts, parchments or even

carved in stone. History was the subject of academics and not the common man. The

concept of “public history” would have its foundation established in the 1800s and early

1900s by historians with these new viewpoints such as Turner, James Harvey Robinson,

Carl L. Becker and Lucy M. Salmon. Building upon the ideas of these four and others, a

number of institutions and groups grew and contributed to the building of this new

movement. Finally, the very relationship between academic historians and the new

“public” historians altered and changed therefore creating a new field and new historians

that were a reflection of the events happening around them.

The study of history and the meaning of just the word “history” have changed

significantly over the past hundred years. James Harvey Robinson argued in 1912 that

historians had been focused too much on matters of the state and conflict. He argued that

“we are taught to view mankind as in a periodic state of turmoil.”2 His “New History”

theory was to break free from this old mold and focus on such things as the scientific

breakthroughs happening around us. Robinson believed that these were changing

mankind’s history far more than wars. Carl Becker built on this by stating that history is

1
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of History” in Ray Allen Billington, Frontier and
Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1961), 19.
2
James Harvey Robinson, The New History: Essays Illustrating Modern Historical Outlook (New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1912), 12.
 Whittenberg 3

really “the memory of things said and done” and every person must have some

knowledge of history.3 Revolutionary educator, Lucy Maynard Salmon, seemed to

mirror Becker’s thoughts (although she did it a number of years before he wrote his

article) by using her own backyard as a teaching tool for history. She looked outside and

remarked “who made the first fence, and who gave him the right to make the fence?”4

She also encouraged people to look at their town’s street to find history. These four

found history in the little things that affect all of us and could be relevant to the most

unlearned person.

Corresponding with these new thoughts on history or perhaps because of them,

there was a rise in a number of individuals, groups and institutions working towards

bringing history to the average public. Several of these individuals were more

entrepreneur and collectors than traditional academic historians. Book publisher and

printer, Hubert Howe Bancroft, turned to history almost as a hobby after his fortunes had

been made in his late thirties. He started collecting items from California and eventually

spread to the entire western part of North America. He hired assistants and eventually

comprised thirty-nine volumes of research. Bancroft marketed his works through

subscriptions (and self-publishing), which netted him a profit of a half a million dollars

and guaranteed the set would not go out of print.5 Another such promoter was Lyman

Copeland Draper who had a mission, as written by Larry Gara, to “rescue from oblivion

the forgotten heroes of the border wars and early settlements” by traveling an estimated

3
Carl L. Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” American Historical Review 37 (1932), 223.
4
Lucy Maynard Salmon, History and the Texture of Modern Life: Selected Essays (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 79.
5
John Walton Caughey, “Hubert Howe Bancroft, Historian of Western America,” The American
Historical Review 50 (April 1945), 464-465.
 Whittenberg 4

46,000 miles collecting documents.6 He eventually moved to Wisconsin and helped

establish the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and became a champion for the state

capital of Madison. When Draper died, his collection went entirely to the historical

society which would arrange and sort his papers to eventually total 478 bound volumes

making the society “one of the nation’s outstanding research centers for western

history.”7 The collections of these men were dedicated to finding anything and

everything regarding their subject of interest which, again, is building upon that concept

of history in the little things for everyone.

Like Draper in Wisconsin, the 1800s and early 1900s was a period of creating

historical societies. From her book, American Historical Societies 1790-1860, Leslie W.

Dunlap wrote that the initial need was apparent as “the establishment of the first sixty-

five historical societies in the United States was the realization that action was necessary

to preserve historical records.”8 Some of the societies were created by charters from

states but most originated in a group of people with a common interest would meet and

decided to form a society. After organizing, they would then petition the state legislature

for some sort of formal recognition. While some societies were located in state capitals,

others would be areas of large populations or towns with universities. In one

extraordinary example, Dr. Benjamin Franklin Shambaugh, a full-time professor of the

University of Iowa and a member of the Board of Curators for the State Historical

6
Larry Gara, “Lyman Copeland Draper” in Clifford L. Lord, ed., Keepers of the Past (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 42.
7
Ibid., 51.
8
Leslie W. Dunlap, American Historical Societies: 1790-1860 (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press,
1974), 10.
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Society of Iowa, moved the location of the society from an old room above a hardware

store to the university. Shambaugh could literally step out of his faculty office and go

across the hall to the SHSI office.9 Like Draper’s goals for Wisconsin, Shambaugh stated

“I dream of the day when Iowa history not only will be translated into folklore but

transmitted into the hearts of our people.”10 These societies were moving history away

from the traditional focus on conflict as Robinson has stated. What started out as merely

official documents in most of these societies, Dunlap explained had grown into

“traditions, legends, anecdotes of persons and places, letters, pictures, maps, songs and

ballads.”11

The growth of historical societies also showed a growth in non-professional and

non-academic “amateurs” taking an active role in what we would likely label today

public history. A number of these amateur groups were comprised of predominantly

women. For example, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association was formed in 1853 to

preserve George Washington’s plantation. This was the first of its type in the United

States and historian James M. Lindgren credits the organization with beginning the

“modern preservation movement.”12 While he believed that these groups were doing this

for more romantic reasons than professional, several structures like Mount Vernon would

probably not have survived to today without their help. It is also important to note that

9
Rebecca Conard, Benjamin Shambaugh and the Intellectual Foundations of Public History (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 48.
10
Ibid., 47.
11
Dunlap, 20.
12
James M. Lindgren, “A New Departure in Historic, Patriotic Work: Personalism,
Professionalism, and Conflicting Concepts of Material Culture in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries,” The Public Historian 18 (Spring 1996), 43.
 Whittenberg 6

several of these amateurs were African American women, who were striving to promote

not only their sex but race. They also formed societies along with libraries and reading

rooms. African American men were invited as well with several volumes being written

by both men and women to highlight the African American soldiers, patriots and heroes

of the various wars from the American Revolution to the twentieth century.13 Professor

of Black Studies at Wellesley College, Tony Martin, called some of the people in these

groups bibliophiles that collected and cataloged works by African Americans to “counter

the pseudo-scientific racism that was so prevalent during this time when so-called

scholars and writers were claiming that black people were by nature inferior.”14 Without

their work, the secondary goal of providing “a body of information for posterity” would

surely have never happened.15 Also, amateurs (both white and black) focused on the

women’s movements and the plight of women in general. This was in contrast to the

normal fascination with politics as Bonnie G. Smith wrote that professional historians

during the turn of the century did not “study poor or ordinary people since they did not

study women.”16 If public history is for everyone, these amateurs were creating books

and other resources that all could enjoy and learn from.

Along with historical societies, another trend in the field of public history was

emerging at a rapid pace. Increasingly, states were seeing the need for archives.

13
Julie Des Jardins, “African American Women’s Historical Consciousness” in Women and the
Historical Enterprise in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 120-121.
14
Tony Martin, “Bibliophiles, Activists, and Race Men” in Sinnette, Coates, and Battle, eds.,
Black Bibliophiles and Collectors: Preservers of Black History (Washington, D. C.: Howard University
Press, 1990), 29.
15
Ibid., 30.
16
Bonnie G. Smith, “High Amateurism and the Panoramic Past” in The Gender of History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 174.
 Whittenberg 7

According to archivist and author Patricia Galloway, most early archives were

“motivated by a filiopietistic desire to preserve evidence,” but all faced the possibilities

of being influenced by various political interests.17 For example, the Mississippi

Department of Archives and History (established in 1902) and its first director, Dunbar

Rowland, could be argued to have primarily been a promoter of the “Lost Cause” of the

failed Confederacy instead of covering every possibility of Mississippi history. Galloway

would also write that neither Rowland nor the institution had much choice with a Board

of Trustees where “two were Confederate veterans, three the sons of veterans, one a

legislative participant in the overthrow of Reconstruction and two present at the 1890

Constitutional Convention.”18 Another example is the state of Illinois had let the

secretary of the state office keep legal records till a need was perceived for an archives

division (where it would be part of the Illinois State Library till 1957). Margaret Cross

Norton would become the first archivist of Illinois in 1922 and serve there for over thirty-

five years. In a field dominated by men, Norton would become a charter member of the

Society of American Archivists (serving as its first vice-president and fourth president),

secretary-treasurer of the National Association of State Libraries and also be the editor

for the American Archivist in 1946.19 Unlike Rowland, the Illinois archives were

perceived as a place by political agencies to store all important documents (no matter the

subject) along with documents perceived as being too recent to be viewed by the public.

17
Patricia Galloway, “Archives, Power and History: Dunbar Rowland and the Beginning of the
State Archives of Mississippi (1902-1936),” American Archivist 69 (2006), 82.
18
Ibid., 94.
19
Thorton W. Mitchell, Norton on Archives: The Writings of Margaret Cross Norton on Archival
& Records Management (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), xvi.
 Whittenberg 8

One wonders then if Norton had the same problem as the Library of Congress in 1993

when they released Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s papers to the public

shortly after his death prompting many to examine the other judges’ decisions on current

issues like abortion.20 In these earlier times, archivists had perhaps more power in the

releasing of documents and furthering their own causes.

Along with historical societies, amateur groups and archives, another aspect that

was slower to change its perspective from the scholarly to the common public was

museums. Historian and author Marjorie Schwarzer wrote that museums of the late

1800s were places “for the elite and privileged” and managed by a “socially prominent

patrician class.”21 She described museums as mainly “cabinet of curiosities” where

collectors would show everything they owned.22 It would take revolutionary thinkers like

John Dewey and his wife as they took school children to museums as part of their

educational curriculum. Even though the Deweys were doing this in 1896, it would be

many more years before most museums would change their attitudes about the common

man attending. Most structures were just too imposing in appearance as well as the

smallest admission fee usually out of reach for most Americans. Most were also off

limits to African Americans or only available to then one day a week.23 Lagging behind

the other public history institutions, it would take the twentieth century for museums to

grow from a mere 1,400 in 1928 to over 10,000 in 1998 with an estimated 865 annual

20
Randall C. Jimerson, “Ethical Concerns for Archivists,” The Public Historian 28 (2006), 87.
21
Marjorie Schwarzer, Riches, Rivals and Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America (American
Association of Museums, 2006), 3.
22
Ibid., 7.
23
Ibid., 10.
 Whittenberg 9

attendance.24 This was done by creating structures, displays and shows not only less

imposing to the general public but marketed especially for them.

With the rise of these new public history ventures, the relationship of the

traditional academic historian would begin to evolve. For example, academics struggled

with the ideas of an entrepreneur like New England historian J. Franklin Jameson for

suggesting joining scholarly work with business patrons in a speech in 1987 to the

American Historical Association.25 This is certainly not as true in our modern era where

a former university historian, Shelley Bookspan, started her own video company based on

creating an oral history for individuals, companies or other groups.26 Another example is

the Old Independence Regional Museum that worked closely with private donors, the

local community and even a specific family to develop a traveling exhibit of mainly

community photographs that would have surely been looked down upon by academics of

the past.27 Where traditionally academics have rejected advances in technology, public

historians have been more open. In the case of radio, author Ian Tyrell wrote that “the

State Historical Society of Iowa gave a series of radio talks in connection with Iowa

History Week in 1928. In Minnesota, more than twenty talks were given in 1927-28,

with the result that family papers and diaries were turned over to the Minnesota State

24
Ibid., 6.
25
Morey D. Rothberg, “The Brahmin as Bureaucrat: J. Franklin Jameson at the Carnegie
Institution of Washington, 1905-1928,” The Public Historian 8 (1986), 50.
26
Shelley Bookspan, “Something Ventured, Many Things Gained: Reflections on Being a
Historian Entrepreneur,” The Public Historian 28 (2006), 70.
27
Jo Blatti, “Harry Miller’s Vision of Arkansas, 1900-1910: A Case Study in Sponsored Projects,”
The Public Historian 28 (2006), 82.
 Whittenberg 10

Historical Society.”28 This conflict continues in recent years such as the case of Dr.

Russell Lewis who created quite a controversy for suggesting DNA analysis of Mary

Todd Lincoln's cloak to see if it was truly stained with blood from the President's

assassination.29 Change is slow, but academia becomes more and more open each year to

the possibilities.

The modern era has seen public history truly become a field of its own. Using the

notions set forth by past innovators like Turner and Becker, public historians like

Katharine T. Corbett and Howard S. Miller would write “every person used history every

day to make sense of the world” and “the burden of engagement lay with the

professionals.”30 With the rise of historical societies, archives, museums and a host of

dedicated people (both amateur and professional), the possibilities of engaging all of

society continues to grow. Public history is taught as a completely separate major in

several institutions. In an article for The Public Historian, Noel J. Stowe explained that

“public history programs introduce students to different models of practice through

courses and projects” and “prepare students in the high-order practice of the discipline.”31

According to Stowe, it is a reflective practice. However, it can also be controversial and

conflict with government as Canada Science and Technology Museum historian Sharon

Babian lamented over a “Parks Canada historian researching the Northwest Rebellion or

28
Ian Tyrrell, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970 (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2005), 91.
29
Russell Lewis, “Judgments of Value, Judgments of Fact: The Ethical Dimension of
Biohistorical Research,” The Public Historian 28 (2006), 96.
30
Katharine T. Corbett and Howard S. Miller, “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry,” The Public
Historian 28 (2006), 18.
31
Noel J. Stowe, “Public History Curriculum: Illustrating Reflective Practice,” The Public
Historian 28 (2006), 40.
 Whittenberg 11

the Acadian Expulsions.”32 It can be used in private consulting like the Historical

Research Associates firm that studied over twenty highways and roads that crossed

national forests in Wyoming and Idaho.33 Public history can even be used for litigation in

cases like the thirty lawsuits historian Craig E. Colten was asked to participate in

involving, in his own words, “a historical perspective on industrial waste-management

practices and capabilities.”34 These examples and countless others show not only the

evolution of public history but how much it is now involved with modern society. Public

history is for the public and about the public. It is for all.

32
Sharon Babaian, “So Far, So Good: Ethics and the Government Historian,” The Public
Historian 28 (2006), 103.
33
Alan S. Newwell, “Personal and Professional Issues in Private Consulting,” The Public
Historian 28 (2006), 108.
34
Craig E. Colten, “The Historian’s Responsibility in Litigation Support,” The Public Historian
28 (2006), 111.
 Whittenberg 12

Bibliography

Becker, Carl L. “Everyman His Own Historian.” American Historical Review 37 (1932),
221-236.

Caughey, John Walton. “Hubert Howe Bancroft, Historian of Western America.” The
American Historical Review 50 (April 1945), 461-470.

Conard, Rebecca. Benjamin Shambaugh and the Intellectual Foundations of Public

History. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002.

Des Jardins, Julie. “African American Women’s Historical Consciousness” in Women

and the Historical Enterprise in America. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2003, 118-142.

Dunlap, Leslie W. American Historical Societies: 1790-1860. Philadelphia: Porcupine

Press, 1974.

Galloway, Patricia. “Archives, Power and History: Dunbar Rowland and the Beginning
of the State Archives of Mississippi (1902-1936).” American Archivist 69 (2006),
79-116.

Gara, Larry. “Lyman Copeland Draper” in Clifford L. Lord, ed. Keepers of the Past.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965, 40-52.

Lindgren, James M. “A New Departure in Historic, Patriotic Work: Personalism,

Professionalism, and Conflicting Concepts of Material Culture in the Late
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” The Public Historian 18 (Spring
1996), 41-60.

Martin, Tony. “Bibliophiles, Activists, and Race Men” in Sinnette, Coates, and Battle,
eds., Black Bibliophiles and Collectors: Preservers of Black History.
Washington, D. C.: Howard University Press, 1990, 23-34.

Mitchell, Thorton W. Norton on Archives: The Writings of Margaret Cross Norton on

Archival & Records Management. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1975.

Robinson, James Harvey. “The New History” in The New History: Essays Illustrating the
Modern Historical Outlook. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912.

Rothberg, Morey D. “The Brahmin as Bureaucrat: J. Franklin Jameson at the Carnegie

Institution of Washington, 1905-1928.” The Public Historian 8 (1986), 47-60.

Salmon, Lucy Maynard. History and the Texture of Modern Life: Selected Essays.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
 Whittenberg 13

Schwarzer, Marjorie. Riches, Rivals and Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America.
American Association of Museums, 2006.

Smith, Bonnie G. “High Amateurism and the Panoramic Past” in The Gender of History.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998, 157-184.

The Public Historian, vol.28:1 (2006), selected articles.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of History” in Ray Allen Billington,

Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson. Englewood Cliffs,
New Jersey: Prentice- Hall, Inc., 1961.

Tyrrell, Ian. Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.