How Has Public History Changed Since 1951?

‘In 1951 Britain did not need “public history” to remind us that great events had reshaped our world’

Geoffrey Parker is Distinguished University Professor and Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History at the Ohio State University

I can’t remember when I first read History Today: probably not in 1951, when I was seven, but soon afterwards my parents bought me a subscription, since history is the only subject I really enjoy. I have read every issue since, mainly because History Today covers all periods, areas, and aspects of our discipline. It was – and has remained – the essence of what we now call ‘public history’.

But in 1951 Britain did not need ‘public history’ to remind us that great and terrible events around the globe had reshaped our world. Bomb craters and gutted buildings surrounded us; so did school friends who had lost one and sometimes both parents. We all knew veterans who refused to talk about what they had done, seen, and heard during the war. Although the blackout had ended, rationing had not: only limited quantities of clothes, petrol, coal, and (more significant for the young) sweets were available, and all required ‘coupons’.

Admittedly the Festival of Britain that year, planned by the Labour government to foster a feeling of recovery from the war (and looking resolutely forward, not back), offered a glimmer of hope. With a travelling exhibition (which even reached Nottingham, where I lived) and a main site on the South Bank of the Thames in London, it was visited by eight million people despite the exorbitant entry price of five shillings (25 pence). A month after the Festival ended, a new Conservative government demolished every new building on the South Bank except for the Royal Festival Hall.

Other signs of optimism in 1951 (besides the launch of History Today) included the first episodes of The Archers and The Goon Show on BBC radio; the birth of ‘Dennis the Menace’ in the comic Beano; and the appearance of the first zebra crossings and the first supermarkets – but even these did not entirely lift the postwar gloom. Just read the autobiographies of my eminent contemporaries, both born in 1943: Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards’ Life, and former editor of History Today Juliet Gardiner’s Joining the Dots. Their dark childhood memories match mine, and their parents had the same great fear as mine: not of World War III, but a return of the Great Depression.

‘There had to be a single correct version of the past’

Ronald Hutton is Professor of History at the University of Bristol

In 1951 public-facing British history-writing was still designed to fulfil a Victorian remit: to explain how modern Britain had come to be, and (less explicitly) to celebrate it. In other words, it was a tale of the achievement of Protestantism, heavy industry, Great Power status, constitutional monarchy and representative democracy, and an honouring of white, British, heterosexual men who were at least nominally Christian. It was also believed that, ultimately, there had to be a single correct version of the past, achieved by battles between conflicting historians from which the most able would emerge triumphant. That would produce a ‘definitive’ version of each part of the story.

This attitude to the national past disintegrated during the 1970s and 1980s, as the foundations of the older Britain – the economic dominance of heavy industry, Great Power status and the colonial empire that had underpinned it, and the Christian values that informed expected sexual behaviour – collapsed. Instead the United Kingdom turned increasingly into a multifaith, multicultural, and multiethnic society, populated by a huge range of office and shop workers, with expectations of gender equality (and, increasingly, mutability), in which sexual preferences became as diverse as everything else. Broad new areas of human activity, especially in the private and personal aspects of life, came into the view of historians, and the study of past cultures and sub-cultures burgeoned as economic forces seemed less potent as agents of change and ideas came to assume a greater power of their own. Postmodernist theory, with its emphasis on the weaknesses of overarching explanatory frameworks and the inaccessibility of objective realities, sapped belief in the project of achieving a final, agreed, and demonstrably accurate picture of any aspect of the past. The gladiatorial model of progress in historical knowledge was largely replaced by a recognition of the value of a range of parallel and differing perceptions of different aspects of former periods.

Unity, cohesion, and a sense of epic narrative have been lost. Freedom, pluralism, sensitivity, and a respect for difference have been gained, and, overall, I am glad.

‘Thirty years ago I was told that no one is interested in history any more’

Bettany Hughes is an historian and broadcaster

As a history student I yearned to infect the public with the enthusiasm for the past that I found in the pages of History Today. Yet this was an age where the new millennium was looming, with a tangible sense that the most cogent answers to society’s dilemmas lay in the future: indeed that a giant reset button would be pushed in the year 2000, proving history to be at best irrelevant, at worst stultifying and polluting. We are creatures of memory, recall travels through our brains within the Default Mode Network – which is also the locus for future planning and imagination. So the great irony of the millennial age was that an obsession with privileging thoughts about the future catalysed the media to engage more consistently with the past. It became clear that ignoring the historical experience did not only denude our present, it etiolated our future. The dawn of the new century saw an explosion of primetime radio and television history projects, including, latterly (shockingly late), those authored by women.

Thirty years ago, as I attempted to pitch a series about ancient history to a BBC producer, I was told three things: 1. No one is interested in history any more; 2. No one watches history programmes on television any more; 3. No one wants to be lectured at by a woman. In some ways that myopic gentleman was right. The rank misogyny that heralded my early films about the ancient world is well documented – he was in fact parroting the zeitgeist. But as the ‘father of scientific history’ Thucydides put it, we study the past so that we can understand the world more clearly. Now public historians such as Paula Akpan, Emily Hauser, and Anita Anand are resetting the historical compass with accessible histories that represent a range of the human experience.

If we remember that the ancient Greek word historie means rational enquiry, and that another ancient word, idiotes, means the idiots who think only about personal matters and refuse to engage in the politics of society, we start to appreciate how ever more vital it is for history to remain, plangently, in the public sphere.

‘In 1951 the history of science scarcely existed’

Patricia Fara is Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge

Transformations in public awareness are often driven by technological innovation. In the early 19th century the introduction of steam printing revolutionised reading patterns by making cheap books and journals readily available. During the 1950s television was the major agent of change. When the decade opened, and History Today was born, only 350,000 households owned their own set; just ten years later more than three-quarters of British homes were relying on television for information and education. As demand rose, producers increasingly filled the hours not only with plays and films, but also with stimulating documentaries about history.

Historians competed for audiences by demonstrating their relevance to contemporary concerns. In successive waves, class, gender, ethnicity, and decolonisation generated new analytical tools for making the past seem relevant to the present. In 1951 my own field – the history of science – scarcely existed, pursued mainly by elderly scientists and doctors keen to trace their own academic ancestry. Nowadays, the subject is thriving and attracts enthusiasts from multiple disciplines. Science has come to dominate every aspect of daily life – and people want to find out why and how that has happened.

Influences operate in both directions, so that science and technology were themselves affected by the new media and the larger audiences they had helped to create. Armed with widely disseminated information about science’s past, campaigners exerted pressure on government agendas, so that policies were debated in public arenas, not exclusively behind the closed doors of laboratories and government departments. In 1949 the astronomer Fred Hoyle coined the evocative expression ‘Big Bang’ in order to denounce it on a popular radio programme, but the label entered mainstream cosmology. Similarly, the drive to eliminate pesticides was launched not by ecologists, but by a bestselling book, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

As a physics student, I experienced gender discrimination at first hand, but as a historian, I have tried to expose how and why it operates. For me, the point of studying the past is to understand how we have reached the present – and the point of doing that is to improve the future.