Shop Talk

This special issue focuses on public history as labor, so it is all shop talk. Each author or set of authors is talking about the culture, experience, struggle, and success of being a public history worker. The pieces are elevated and contextualized versions of the conversations that public history workers have been having with each other at conferences, on social media, and everywhere in between. This issue presents them both as a record of current working conditions and to generate solidarity by spreading wisdom and sparking conversation. Read cover-to-cover, they present a variety of experiences written by current professionals in our mosaic field. Each piece also contributes to a long running tradition of talking about public history work, opens new avenues for thinking about public history as work, and asks us to reflect on ourselves as workers.Although this is the first special issue of The Public Historian focused on labor, public historians have talked about their work a lot, and the topics of discussion have changed over time. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the process of getting a job was the main concern. In the 1990s and 2000s the scholarship focused on the struggle and richness of our work, negotiating sharing authority, reaching communities, and remaining self-aware in our production. In the 2010s public historians, following the lead of labor studies scholars focused on the service sector, engaged with the emotional cost of public history work. Since 2020, public historians have considered their professional and economic survival during and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, as evident in this issue’s pages, we are talking about solidarity, labor, and the realities of being “workers in a workplace.”1Despite all the shop talk, it may come as a surprise that in the last forty-eight years the topic of compensation for professional work has largely been only hinted at, usually by those worried about the corrupting power of for-profit work, but rarely spoken of directly in the scholarship.2 Authors have written about pay, but not in great detail, six times: once in 1978, twice in 1980, once in 1991, in 1999, and again in 2021.3 The six pieces, sparse as they are, represent a precedence for talking about professional compensation that we can develop into a more robust discussion that leads to new ways of thinking about our work.To help energize, normalize, and fortify a discussion about past and present paid work in public history I present a two-part historiography. This piece draws mainly from places I identified as the sites of scholarly shop talk: the publications in our professional associations’ journals, magazines, university presses, and association blogs. The characters and plots should be familiar, but the specific organization employed here seeks to empower and encourage the conversations that workers, managers, and professors are having, or should be having, about compensation in public history. This historiography is not simply a preamble but a new way of looking at the scholarship.It begins with an exploration of how scholars have defined and understood public history, first as a university-trained profession, and later as a cultural practice. This section traces the receding recognition of public history as a professional, implicitly paid, job. The second section brings together the field’s occasional pieces of published shop talk, from the job crisis in the 1970s to the job crisis today, to create a new chapter of public history’s story. Combined, the two sections tell the history of public historians’ relationship to their own work. I conclude by advocating for shop talk and considering where we can go next.Those of us who study public history and historical memory recognize that history’s power comes from people’s use of stories to define themselves and motivate their futures. The field of public history is no different. For this reason, it is important to not only understand the story of public history that historians write, but to also consider how the historical definition has reflected and shaped our ability to talk shop about pay and other workplace concerns.In the simplest terms historians recognize public history as having gone through three phases of development. First, the field’s root practices, archiving and preservation, began as community-lead cultural work. Then practitioners and professors built professional university programs that produced people called “public historians.” Most recently, university-trained public historians have learned that they have a shared authority with the public and community culture workers. As part of this development, trained public historians endeavored to share the title “public historian” with those whose practices closely aligned with their university-trained methods, ethics, and practices. Over the last forty-eight years, dozens of scholars put this story together in real-time. As the field’s practitioners began to recognize that authority is shared, the field’s writers expanded the history, and vice versa.4 The story told in the scholarship ultimately follows the same path outlined above but is far more complex.In the early days of formalized public history, the late 1970s, the field’s founders defined public historians by their places of employment. Robert Kelley, a historian of public policy and one of the founders of the first academic public history graduate program at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), wrote in the first issue of The Public Historian (TPH) that “Public History refers to the employment of historians and the historical method outside of academia.”5 He specified that practitioners can be found in “government, private corporations, the media, historical societies and museums, even in private practice,” and tended to answer questions posed to them by others rather than dictating their own research agenda.6 G. Wesley Johnson, a colleague of Kelley’s at UCSB and founding editor of TPH, in the same issue outlined eight public history “sectors”: government, business, research organizations, the media, historical preservation, archives and record management, and the teaching of public history.7 These scholars defined public history through the combination of formal history training, methodological practice, and employment. All practitioners were assumed to have advanced training in history, holding either an MA or a PhD, and their place of employment was the key to defining them as either an academic or public historian.Johnson argued that public history developed out of the postwar world’s need for history skills and methods “outside of the academy.”8 He noted that when the American Historical Association (AHA) developed the formal historical profession in the late nineteenth century, scholars joined universities and were thus isolated from the public.9 Johnson and Richard G. Hewlett explained that although World War II brought historians out of universities and into government jobs, the immediate postwar expansion of university education reabsorbed them back into academia.10 These university scholars mentored and developed more scholars to occupy their chairs and the additional ones that would be established in the mid-twentieth century. Johnson and Hewlett presented a story in which the cycle of academic mentorship thrived until the demand for historical education dropped in the 1970s. Arnita Jones referred to this as “the crisis in teaching,” also referred to as the jobs crisis.11 The story they presented neatly argued that the formalized public history movement developed out of the need in the 1970s to formally employ historians, and that public historians were university-trained professionals who held implicitly paid jobs outside of universities.Employment location did not endure as the profession’s main defining factor for long, as the early authors featured in The Public Historian were not the only ones doing history in public and would not be the only ones to write its story. Noting this in 1984, only six years after the journal’s founding, Shelley Bookspan, one of UCSB’s first PhD students in public history and a historical consultant (and later, editor of TPH), pressed for a new way to define public historians. She argued that public history was not limited to workplace descriptions but was also a unique intellectual and methodological practice that developed from the new social history’s use of data, embrace of common people’s stories, and efforts to expand “the scope of history.”12Following on this, in 1987, Michael C. Scardaville, who came to public history by way of a museum career rather than as an academic, argued that the tendency to define public historians by their workplace rather than a “certain historical approach” served to “highlight historians’ differences” rather than unite them.13 He explained that public history’s roots stretched farther back, before the job crisis of the 1970s or even the birth of the AHA in 1884. Instead, he offered that public history began with “patrician historians” doing the work of historical collection and study in the mid-nineteenth century.14 Locating the field’s origins in this way, he argued, reminded public historians that they did not need to convince the “historical profession of the viability of public history” but rather needed to embrace and foster the professional relationship they had always had with “nonhistorians,” that is, the public.15 He located public history’s roots not in a response to joblessness, but in a long practiced community engagement. Five years later, in 1992, Page Putman Miller, a university professor, added to Scardaville and Bookspan’s arguments, explaining that public historians’ use of “under-utilized documents” and their “multi-disciplinary analysis” made their approach, rather than place of work, their distinction.16As the study of public history developed over the 1990s and early 2000s, scholars adopted Bookspan, Scardaville, and Putman Miller’s approach-based definitions of public historians, past and present. Michael C. Batinski, David Glassberg, Tony Bennett, Edward Alexander, Juliee Decker, Mary Alexander, Steven Conn, Brent Tarter, Alea Henle, and Patricia West recognized that public historians of the later twentieth century shared a practice and community consciousness with “patrician” historians. These elite white and Black Americans, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, formed historical associations to preserve documents, materials, and later landmarks and homes.17 Their scholarship pulled the story of public history’s birth back into the nineteenth century, and back to the public.Denise Meringolo, Clarissa J. Ceglio, and William S. Walker wove the history of professional academic and institutional historians in the early decades of 1900 into public history roots. They told the story of how the federal government and the AHA worked together to legitimize the definition of the professional historian as one with academic training, and used this definition to structure the regulations for public facing projects, such as historical sites and preservation efforts.18 They illustrated how the of the formally trained profession and the that “patrician” history had Their story of academic and public history back the that either developed first or to each and illustrated how they and to the century, the relationship historical and the of history work. 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This all begins by a of pay to our shop talk and scholarship and following it all by looking out for our and established workers. we can for each other as as we have for the that we work with and the that we help we are to be for the