The Rise of Public History: An International Perspective

This article explores the birth and development of public history and presents the different criteria of its internationalization from the 1970s to the more recent creation of the International Federation of Public History. Based mostly on North America and Europe, the international perspective sets the development of public history in the United States into a broader context of debates about the changing role of historians. While public history was mostly perceived in the 1980s as the application —through consulting— of history to presentday issues, the more recent internationalization is made of a variety of local and national approaches to the field.