HIST1700 Introduction to Public History: Theory and Practice

The field of public history has been expanding so rapidly since its inception in the 1970s that even public historians find it difficult to agree on a precise definition for public history. This course adopts a broad definition, which seeks to understand public history as a discipline in which historians practice history with a public audience in mind, and as a medium through which the general public acquire a sense of the past. Major topics examined in this course include museums, heritage, films, public monuments and tourism, etc. Local and global examples are used.

Learning Outcomes

After taking this course, students will be able to

1. understand the roles history and historians play in various public settings in Hong Kong and in other countries.
2. analyze the popular use of history in everyday life.
3. gain awareness of the ethical concerns within the discipline of public history.

1. Public History: A Changing Discipline
2. Bridging the Gap between Historians and the Public
3. Popular Uses of History
4. Presenting the Past: Museums
5. Power Politics of World Heritage
6. Changing Definitions of Heritage: From Tangible to Intangible
7. Marketing History and Heritage: A Local Perspective
8. Marketing History and Heritage: A Global Perspective
9. History and the Mass Media
10. Projecting History in Public Space: Monuments and Power
11. Public History and Collective Memory
12. Gender and Public History
13. Conclusion: The Future of Public History

• Class participation: 10%
• Tutorial Participation and Discussion: 15% [Oct. 18, 25, Nov. 1]
• Group Project Presentation: 10% [Nov. 22, 29]
• Group Project: 35% (8,000-12,000 words in English, including footnotes and references)
• Individual essay: 30% (2,000-2,500 words in English, including footnotes and references)

Oct. 18: Marketing History and Heritage: A Global Perspective
Oct. 25: Public History and Collective Memory
Nov. 1: Gender and Public History
Nov. 22: Group Project Presentation
Nov. 29: Group Project Presentation

1. Public History: A Changing Discipline

• Cauvin, Thomas. Public History: A Textbook of Practice (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), Ch. 1, “Introduction.”
• Kelley, Robert. “Public History: Its Origins, Nature, and Prospects.” Public Historian1 (Fall 1978), pp. 16-28.

2. Bridging the Gap between Historians and the Public

• Woods, Thomas A. “Museums and the Public: Doing History Together.” Journal of American History (Dec. 1995): 1111-1115.
• Thompson, Paul. The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 309-323 (A Life-Story Interview Guide).

3. Popular Uses of History

• Cauvin, Thomas. Public History: A Textbook of Practice (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), Ch. 3, “Collecting and Preserving People’s Stories. Oral History, Family History, and Everyday Life.”
• Rosenzweig, Roy and David Thelen. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 15-36

4. Presenting the Past: Museums

• Carroll, John M. “Displaying the Past to Serve the Present: Museums and Heritage Preservation in Post-Colonial Hong Kong.” Twentieth-Century China 31 (2005), pp. 76-103.
• Kohn, Richard H. “History and the Culture Wars: The Case of the Smithsonian Institution’s Enola Gay Exhibition.” The Journal of American History, Vol. 82, No. 3 (Dec. 1995), pp. 1036-1063.

 5. Power Politics of World Heritage

• Logan, William. “States, Governance and the Politics of Culture: World Heritage in Asia.” In Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia (Oxon, Routledge, 2012), pp. 113-128.
• Wray, Ian. “Lessons from a Sorry World Heritage Saga.” Town & Country Planning (November/ December 2021), pp. 396-402.

6. Changing Definitions of Heritage: From Tangible to Intangible

• Liu, Tik-sang, ed. Intangible Cultural Heritage and Local Communities in East Asia (Hong Kong: South China Research Center, HKUST, 2011).
• Smith, Laurajane. Uses of Heritage (London & New York, Routledge, 2006), pp. 11-43.

7. Marketing History and Heritage: A Local Perspective

• Cheung, Sidney C. H. “Remembering through Space: The Politics of Heritage in Hong Kong.” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 9:1 (Mar 2003), pp. 7-26.
• Henderson, Joan. “Heritage, Identity and Tourism in Hong Kong.” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 7: 3 (2001), 219-235.

8. Marketing History and Heritage: A Global Perspective (Tutorial 1)

• Figal, Gerald. Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), pp. 25-49 (Ch. 1, Tours among the Ruins), pp. 51-86 (Ch. 2, The Touristification of Sacred Places).

9. History and the Mass Media

• White, Geoffrey M. “Disney’s Pearl Harbor: National Memory at the Movies.” The Public Historian 24, no. 4 (2002), pp. 97 – 115.
• Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Movie or Monograph? A Historian/Filmmaker’s Perspective.” The Public Historian, vol. 25, no. 3 (2003), pp. 45-48.

10. Projecting History in Public Space: Monuments and Power

• Goldman, Natasha. “Israeli Holocaust Memorial Strategies at Yad Vashem: From Silence to Recognition.” Art Journal (Summer 2006), pp. 102–22.
• Hung, Chang-tai. “The Monument to the People’s Heroes.” In Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 235-255.

11. Public History and Collective Memory (Tutorial 2)

• Hung, Chang-tai. “Oil Paintings and History.” In Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic, 127-151.
• Schudson, Micheal. “Dynamics of Distortion in Collective Memory.” In Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, edited by Daniel L. Schacter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 346-364.
• Yoshida, Takashi. The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 129-164.

12. Gender and Public History (Tutorial 3)

• Kwon, Vicki Sung-yeon. “The Sonyŏsang Phenomenon: Nationalism and Feminism Surrounding the “Comfort Women” Statue.” Korean Studies, Vol. 43 (2019), pp. 6-39.
• DeWitt, Lindsey E. “World Cultural Heritage and Women’s Exclusion from Sacred Sites in Japan.” Sacred Heritage in Japan, edited by Aike P. Rots and Mark Teeuwen (Oxon: Routledge, 2020), pp. 65-86.
• Smith, Laurajane. “Heritage, Gender and Identity.” In Brian Graham and Peter Howard, eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 159-178.

 13. Conclusion: The Future of Public History

• Hamilton, Paula & James B. Gardner. “The Past and Future of Public History: Developments and Challenges.” In Paula Hamilton and James B. Gardner, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Public History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1-22.

Attention is drawn to University policy and regulations on honesty in academic work, and to the disciplinary guidelines and procedures applicable to breaches of such policy and regulations. Details may be found at http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/policy/academichonesty/.

With each assignment, students will be required to submit a signed declaration that they are aware of these policies, regulations, guidelines and procedures.

• In the case of group projects, all members of the group should be asked to sign the declaration, each of whom is responsible and liable to disciplinary actions, irrespective of whether he/she has signed the declaration and whether he/she has contributed, directly or indirectly, to the problematic contents.
• For assignments in the form of a computer-generated document that is principally text-based and submitted via VeriGuide, the statement, in the form of a receipt, will be issued by the system upon students’ uploading of the soft copy of the assignment.

Assignments without the properly signed declaration will not be graded by teachers.

Only the final version of the assignment should be submitted via VeriGuide.

The submission of a piece of work, or a part of a piece of work, for more than one purpose (e.g. to satisfy the requirements in two different courses) without declaration to this effect shall be regarded as having committed undeclared multiple submissions. It is common and acceptable to reuse a turn of phrase or a sentence or two from one’s own work; but wholesale reuse is problematic. In any case, agreement from the course teacher(s) concerned should be obtained prior to the submission of the piece of work.