The Long History of Public History in Europe

Public history has been a rising field of theory and practice for a few decades now. Its origins are debated but the current literature places its popularization in the 1970s in the United States of America. While professional and academic history merely developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, plenty of other historical practices testified of the way certain people, groups and institutions were engaging with the past in older times. This book puts public history into longer historical perspectives in Europe. Following a chronological order, the book includes chapters on historical practices involving and addressing publics from the Antiquity to the mid-twentieth century. The case studies show the richness and diversity of public historical practices as well as re-visit the question of the role of the public in interpreting the past in countries such as Greece, Britain, Ireland, France, Italy, Poland, Belgium, and Spain. In a current international context of rising public history projects, we need to be able to place the field into longer historical debates. Our objective is to contribute to and invite more research on the history of public historical practices in Europe and beyond.