James B. Gardner has held senior management positions at the National Archives (US), the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, the American Historical Association, and the American Association for State and Local History. He has served as president of the National Council on Public History, chair of the Nominating Board of the Organization of American Historians, on the AASLH Council, and on the editorial boards of The Public Historian and the AAM Press.
Paula Hamilton is adjunct Professor of History at the University of Technology, Sydney. She was involved in setting up the public history program there which ran between 1989-2005 and was co-director of the Australian Centre for Public History until 2013 and co-editor of Public History Review. Paula has collaborated in a range of historical projects, including one assessing the significance of an oral history collection at the NSW state library; but she also has worked with community groups, museums, heritage
agencies and trade unions.

• Contributors


• Introduction


• James B. Gardner and Paula Hamilton


• Part I. The Changing Public History Landscape


• 1. Internationalizing Public History


• Serge Noiret and Thomas Cauvin


• 2. Complexity and Collaboration: Doing Public History in Digital Environments


• Sharon M. Leon


• Part II. Doing Public History


• 3. Decentralizing Culture: Public History and Communities


• Barbara Franco


• 4. Trading Zones: Collaborative Ventures in Disability History


• Jocelyn Dodd, Ceri Jones, and Richard Sandell


• 5. Popular Understandings of the Past: Interpreting History through Graphic Novels


• Kees Ribbens


• 6. The Business of History: Customers, Professionals, and Money


• Brian W. Martin


• Part III. Pushing the Boundaries of Public History


• 7. Public Histories for Human Rights: Sites of Conscience and the Guantánamo Public Memory Project


• Liz Sevcenko


• 8. Archives for Justice, Archives of Justice


• Trudy Huskamp Peterson


• 9. Sexuality and the Cities: Interdisciplinarity and the Politics of Queer Public History


• Kevin P. Murphy, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Alex Urquhart


• 10. Public History and the Environment


• Jeffrey K. Stine


• 11. From Environmental Liability to Community Asset: Public History, Communities, and Environmental Reclamation


• T. Allan Comp


• 12. Between Pastness and Presentism: Public History and Local Food Activism


• Cathy Stanton


• Part IV: Public History and the State


• 13. Historians and Public History in the UN System


• Lisa Singleton


• 14. Good Enough for Government Work


• Arnita Jones


• 15. Shaping Institutional Memory: Public History on Capitol Hill


• Donald A. Ritchie


• 16. History, Heritage, and the Representation of Ethnic Diversity: Cultural Tourism in China


• Jonathan Sweet and Fengqi Qian


• 17. Public History, Cultural Institutions, and National Identity: Dialogues about Difference


• Jannelle Warren-Findley


• Part V. Narrative and Voice in Public History


• 18. History Museums and Identity: Finding "Them," "Me," and "Us" in Gallery


• Benjamin Filene


• 19. National Museums, National Narratives, and Identity Politics


• Cristina Lleras


• 20. The Personalization of Loss in Memorial Museums


• Paul Williams


• 21. The Magna Carta: 800 Years of Public History


• Graham Smith and Anna Green


• 22. Public History as a Social Form of Knowledge


• Hilda Kean


• 23. Brownfield Public History: Arts and Heritage in the Aftermath of Deindustrialization


• Steven High


• Part VI. Difficult Public History


• 24. Politics and Memory: How Germans Face their Past


• Udo Gößwald


• 25. The Legacy of Collecting: Colonial Collecting in the Belgian Congo and the Duty of Unveiling Provenance


• Boris Wastiau


• 26. Slavery Tourism: Representing a Difficult History in Ghana


• Bayo Holsey


• 27. How You Understand Your Story: The Survival Story within Cambodian American Genocide Communities


• Socheata Poeuv


• 28. In the Service of the State: Monuments and Memorials in Indonesia


• Paul Ashton, Kresno Brahmantyo and Jaya Keaney


• Index

Public history is a large and complex field, with boundaries, methods, and subjects that are hotly debated, and the Oxford Handbook of Public History reflects these complexities. This book defines public history as a transnational field, and public history work as analytical and active: practical work informed by thoughtful reflection. The book locates public history as a professional practice within an intellectual framework that is increasingly democratic, technological, and transnational.