ABSTRACT
This chapter examines public history and its chief elements: present-mindedness, promiscuity in its choice of what constitutes historical evidence, multi-disciplinarity and anti-intellectualism. It reaches out to historical constituencies such as family historians or popular collectors who are quite untouched by university style history, what is called as the ‘academy’. Public history also differs in its practice across the world. It began life in Australia and the United States and accordingly is seen in those places in a somewhat different light than it is in Europe. Definitions of public history are elastic enough to stretch across geographical borders and to allow the Australian, American and British experiences of public history to mean something different in each context. The chapter explores the tensions created between public history and the academy in what precisely constitutes historical knowledge. Elite culture’s longstanding disregard of national history in favour of classicism and cosmopolitanism gave the past an intrinsically democratic appearance.
