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 explores differing views about heritage and the 'heritage industry' and the ways that the past is conceptualized, and ways too that public history is 'consumed' by the general public. The chapter also explores the tensions created between public history and the academy in what precisely constitutes historical knowledge. Public historians disseminate historical information to a wide audience through institutions such as archives, historical houses or societies, museums, consulting firms, history libraries, and Web sites. Public history provides a useful mode of historical production, concerned as it often is with consumption patterns of the everyday, with contemporary politics and family relations. Learned academic journals from a public history angle are less important to the historical public than the potted histories of a holiday destination featured by an in-flight magazine.
