ABSTRACT
The idea of 'public history' has been used in recent decades in the United States and is now gaining ground rapidly elsewhere. The issues around public history highlight some of the ambiguities of the term 'history' itself. Remnants of the past are everywhere, but they are not necessarily seen as 'history' or understood as elements in a structured account of the past. The means by which publicly displayed collections have come into being are heterogeneous. Indeed, collecting is now an important historical topic in its own right. As a result, museums are an increasingly important subject for those who want to understand attitudes to the past; they have ceased to be a specialised area for museum professionals, and have become major cultural forces in their own right. The idea of a usable past is hardly new, but it is probably more prominent now than it ever has been before.
