Public history is a broad range of activities undertaken by people with some training in the discipline of history who are generally working outside of specialized academic settings. Public history practice is deeply rooted in the areas of historic preservation, archival science, oral history, museum curatorship, and other related fields. The field has become increasingly professionalized in the United States and Canada since the late 1970s. Some of the most common settings for the practice of public history are museums, historic homes and historic sites, parks, battlefields, archives, film and television companies, new media, and all levels of government.
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Public history in the context of Political history
Political history is the narrative and survey of political events, ideas, movements, organs of government, voters, parties and leaders. It is closely related to other fields of history, including diplomatic history, constitutional history, social history, people's history, and public history. Political history studies the organization and operation of power in large societies.
From approximately the 1960s onwards, the rise of competing subdisciplines, particularly social history and cultural history, led to a decline in the prominence of "traditional" political history, which tended to focus on the activities of political elites. In the two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history rose from 31% to 41%, and the proportion of political historians fell from 40% to 30%.
Public history in the context of Otis Graham
Otis Livingston Graham Jr. (1935 – 2017) was an American historian, with a special interest in political history, immigration, and public history.
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 25, 1935, Graham received his BA in history from Yale University in 1957 (he also was a varsity wrestler at Yale). After serving three years as an officer in the US Marine Corps, he earned his PhD in history at Columbia University in 1966 (under Richard Hofstadter and William Leuchtenburg) with a doctoral dissertation entitled The Old Progressive and the New Deal: A Study of the Modern Reform Tradition. He taught at Mount Vernon Seminary and College and then California State University, Hayward, before he joined the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1966 (the same year as Alfred Gollin). Graham taught there until 1980, when he became Distinguished University Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.