| Driven by both social demands and academic transformation,public history emerged in the United States in the 1970 s,followed by the founding of The Public Historian in 1978.As the only official journal of the National Council on Public History,it has marked the discipline forming of American public history,and served as the primary channel for the publication of relevant papers as well as the platform for discipline construction since its inception.Papers,book reviews,reports,interviews,speeches and other texts it published have timely and fully presented core achievements of American public history in different periods.Gradually,the journal has established itself as "the first journal" in American public history with lasting discourse power in the international public historian circle.Given its never-ending academic achievements,representative viewpoints,extensive issues and opinions,authoritative academic influence and a focus on frontier research,the thesis took The Public Historian as a window to observe the trend and theoretical achievements of American public history as a discipline.Between November 1978 and February 2023,the journal continuously published more than a thousand monographs and thousands of academic reviews and other information.Its achievements during the above period were taken as the core historical materials in this thesis.After the extensive reading and information statistics of all texts as well as the intensive reading and discourse analysis of key papers,and with the help of American public history classics in different periods and other research materials,the thesis was aimed to present the general picture and academic style of the journal,reproduce the occupational structure and academic activity mechanism of American public historians,refine focal issues regarding American public history,and explore its theoretical purport of historical publicity and practicability,with a view to providing a specific reference for Chinese scholars to understand American public history and contributing to the proper application of Chinese history.The thesis falls into four chapters.Chapter one reviews the establishment and development of The Public Historian which was founded under the influence of both the civil rights movement and the interdisciplinary development trend of humanities and social sciences in the1970 s.The establishment of the journal was triggered by the course of Public History offered by the University of California,Santa Barbara in response to the employment crisis of postgraduates,and the new cultural history and the new historical movement prior to it injected important historical resources into the journal.Since its inception,it has undergone two transformations,that is,the shift from "solving the employment crisis” to "promoting public participation" in the mid-1980 s,and the new stage of "exploring discipline theories" after 2000.Even though the staging is not absolute,the evolution of the journal witnessed three development stages of American public history.Chapter two analyzes the scholar group of The Public Historian.With a focus on editing and submission,a group of scholars gathered through public historical research and practice have become the main force of American public history and relevant institutes.The issues set by editors and the contributions from authors with different knowledge backgrounds and practical experiences have constituted the knowledge interaction in the text production of the journal,and have jointly built the core discourse position of American public history with the journal as the platform and bond.Chapter three discusses the focal issues of The Public Historian.Public historians respond to practical problems in American society through project practice,raise their experience summaries to the level of academic inquiry,and then publish them in the journal to communicate with their peers.They explore how to participate in public governance and operate commercial institutions,how to meet the demands of citizens for collective identity and individual memory reconstruction,and how to promote the protection and inheritance of historical and cultural folk heritage in a professional manner.The growing cultural demands of the public in the new century has placed new requirements on the skills of public historians,so their professional quality has become another focal issue.Chapter four aims to refine and comment the theoretical purport of The Public Historian.American public historians have changed the core concept of public history twice during their theoretical exploration over the past half a century.The concept transformation of public history from a career option,to a practical action,and then to civic culture was based on the continuous attempts of interdisciplinary approaches,all of which have demonstrated the constant exploration of American public history on its own discipline legitimacy.To take both the practical validity and self-consistent theories into consideration,the theoretical exploration of American public history have always pursued a balance between "truth seeking" and "practical application".Although the application-oriented historical practice awakened the public to the concept that "everyone can be his/her own historian",and to some extent questioned the previous authoritative interpretation of history by professional historians,the excessive practice has resulted in fragmented theories of American public history.Hence,The Public Historian are still striving to construct its theoretical framework.Chapter five analyzes the academic influence of The Public Historian.This chapter focuses on the analysis and statistics of “Letters to the Editor”,“G.Wesley Johnson Award”,and citation data to demonstrate and illustrate the role and influence of The Public Historian.As an authoritative journal in the field of public history research in the United States and even around the world,The Public Historian not only narrows the gap between different historical scholars and amateur historians with diverse working backgrounds both inside and outside the academic world,but also makes the originally decentralized and isolated groups more cohesive and centripetal force,further standardizes and improves the academic standards of this group,and promotes academic exchanges between groups.In conclusion,public history has now been recognized as a new historical form and established itself firmly in the international historian circle.In a sense,The Public Historian has epitomized American public history as a branch of history by recording its academic growth and key moments,and highlighting its characteristics.In contrast to other branches of history,public history is significantly practice-oriented.Guided by specific practical problems,it applies selectively-constructed historical knowledge achievements to society beyond the professional academic circle,so as to better play the realistic functions of history as a public cultural product,such as reflection and enlightenment,identification enhancement and memory reconstruction.The rise and development of public history have reflected the growing demand for public history in the era of knowledge democratization and the exploration of its response and satisfaction mode.The theoretical exploration and practice can provide us with new materials and opportunities to interpret and discuss the old but frequently-debated theoretical historical issues as follows: "what is history","what is functions of history" and "who should history work on" ?... |
