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Public History: Key Concepts and Ethics (Lecture Notes)

Agenda and Course Structure (8/25)

  • Attendance
  • Teaching Methods and Public History
  • The Historical Method
  • Terms
  • Connectedness to the Past Survey
  • Banking and problem-posing models of education
  • Free-choice learning
  • Shared Authority
  • Setting problems vs. problem solving
  • Reflective practice
  • Chapter 2 Terms
  • Historical method
  • Assignment for Next Class:
    • Chapter 3-4 of 'Introduction to Public History' (Lyon)

Problem Posing and Learning Concepts

  • Problem Posing
  • Free choice learning
  • Shared Authority
  • Teaching Methods and Public History

Public History and The Historical Method

  • Public History is Grounded in: The Historical Method
  • Read the secondary sources
  • 1 Identify the elements of the topic that remain unexplored by historians.
  • 2 Develop a historiography
  • 3

Historical Method: Research Questions

  • Historical Categories of Inquiry (Types of Research Questions)
    • Cause and Effect
    • Change and Continuity
    • Turning Points
    • Using the Past Through Their Eyes
  • Decide on a research question

Step Four: Consult the Primary Sources

  • Identify the relevant historical sources—documents, artifacts, visual materials—created during the period being studied.
  • Evaluate the sources

LET'S PRACTICE

  • Introduction to Practicing Public history
  • assignment 1
  • Available on Canvas
  • ༀ (note: stray character appears in transcript: ཨ་; content not meaningful)

Public Historians and Primary Sources: Oral Histories

  • What is an oral history?
  • What are its strengths and limits?

Case Study: The Baltimore ’68 Oral History Project

  • Definitions
  • Community-based participatory research
  • All stages of the research are done in collaboration with members of the community
  • Experients
  • Community experts who have gained knowledge through their own lived experience
  • Narrators
  • Experients who formally record an oral history
  • Intersubjectivity
  • The interviewer’s subjectivity and the narrator’s subjectivity influence one another
  • Cultural brokers
  • People who can become the bridge between two cultures and break down barriers in the process

Oral Histories and Baltimore, 1968: What Happened?

  • Civil disorder
  • Civil disturbance
  • Riot
  • Insurrection
  • What does the public historian do with these different terms used by narrators?

Oral History and Ethics

  • Public historians follow the Best Practices outlined by the Oral History Association
  • Four key elements
  • Preparation
  • Interviewing
  • Preservation
  • Access