Public history as decentralization of authority

Public history invites us to reflect upon who is contributing to historical research. A good place to start is through the relationship between public history and oral history. Michael Frisch’s book “A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History” pointed to the redefinition of authority.Footnote ⁷ Focusing on oral history, he argued that the authority of the historian is, by definition, shared with that of the narrator.Footnote ⁸ This shared authority can actually apply to all steps of public history.

Public history can be compared to a tree, a system in which the roots, the trunk, the branches, and the leaves are interconnected (Figure 2). The production of history is not limited to the trunk – the traditional critical and contextualized interpretation of archives – but extends to the creation and preservation of sources (the roots), the communication of historical narratives through a variety of media (branches), and the public relevance for individuals, groups, and institutions (leaves). Public history is produced in different parts, making it a truly decentralized process of knowledge production.Footnote ⁹

Figure 2.

The Public His’Tree.

Making public history combines different steps and different types of expertise. In other words, trained historians are never the sole actors of the process and often rely on and collaborate with archivists (roots), designers (branches), or historical witnesses (both roots and leaves). Working with media and communication specialists, computer scientists, and artists can for instance help to develop accessibility and therefore make history more public.

We collaborated with a visual artist from Portugal – Mariana Duarte Santos – to produce a historical wall painting in the public space. Based on private archives and oral history, the wall painting was an artistic representation of the town’s past. In this case, the collaboration between historians and the artist helped to visually represent (and make accessible) many historic sites and various personal memories of a changing neighborhood (Figure 3). The challenge of this interdisciplinary approach was to make the public understand that this project was an artistic representation of history, an in-between format that required an additional level of explanation that we produced through an audio explanation accessible via a free phone number.

Figure 3.

HistorEsch wall painting.

Decentralizing history also means doing and producing history beyond usual institutional spaces.Footnote ¹⁰ Unlike some traditional cultural institutions that may have a high threshold for certain groups (of lower socio-economic status or with other reasons for disinclination), HistorEsch aimed, as co-project manager Dr. Joëlla van Donkersgoed argues, to bring history to people where they already live.Footnote ¹¹ We tried to limit the public threshold to access history so the exhibition was accessible (free entry) in one store in the city centre. The painting was created in a low-income neighbourhood, on the wall of a city-owned building accessible to everyone, opposite a site where a new large supermarket is being built.

All our public meetings with the participants took place in coffee places or public community spaces – and not on campus where academic settings could impose pre-existing power relations. Developing accessibility to history contributes to pushing back against the public impressions of scholarly work being elitist and disconnected from reality. Collaboration and decentralization of the public history process contributed to breaking barriers between scholars, practitioners, and local residents, and played a role in the dissemination of historical research.

Bridges between citizen science and public history: tools to support inclusion

Collaboration is not restricted to professionals from different disciplines; it can include non-academic members of the public. Regarding those members of the public, it is crucial for public history to identify and be aware of who is (and who is not) doing and contributing to the history production, to better understand dominant narratives and dominant groups. As Chris Taylor stresses in his article for The Inclusive Historian, “Inclusion emphasizes whether members of diverse groups feel valued and respected within an organization, project, or social system.”Footnote ¹² Making history more public supports inclusion, trust, and respect between participants. These values should be inscribed in all the steps of the collaborative citizen methodology.

Following the Public History as the new Citizen Science of the Past’s methodology and inspired by the European Citizen Science Association’s principles, we have conceived HistorEsch as a citizen science project based on three main pillars.Footnote ¹³ First, members of the public are not passive sources but are active participants in the production of historical knowledge.Footnote ¹⁴ Second, public participation is divided into several tasks and practices so that different profiles, different types of expertise, and different types of commitment (time, resources, availability) can co-exist. Finally, the project should lead to mutual benefit for all participants.

The citizen science participatory approach helped us collect sources for the research. Debates about archiving have shown that public participation helps to enrich and diversify resources and improves the representativity of groups and communities.Footnote ¹⁵ As Michel-Rolph Trouillot explained in Silencing the Past, the recording, collecting, and interpreting of archives involves a succession of steps – choices – that define what is worth preserving or silencing.Footnote ¹⁶ Like museums, archives are not neutral; they are expressions and results of long processes of selection and interpretation. The concept of silencing and representativity in official archives has encouraged practitioners to develop public collaboration.Footnote ¹⁷

In order to develop participatory public history, the initiators of HistorEsch decided to not work with objects, archives, documents, and testimonies already present in official cultural institutions such as museums, archives, and libraries. We instead developed participatory collecting for three main types of sources: physical objects, photographs, and oral testimonies. We had public collecting events all around towns, either through community events or with our wood wagon (Figure 4). For the exhibition, we asked members of the public to look for family objects that they believe tell personal stories that reflect the history of the town. We also created a website where users could download pictures and descriptions of their object.Footnote ¹⁸ We also use digital tools to gather private photographs of the town. In 2021 we launched a Facebook group about the history of Esch-sur-Alzette, which we called FL’ESCH Back – a play on the words “Esch” and “flashback.”Footnote ¹⁹ By 2022, it had accumulated 1400 members and served as a forum to share documents and stories and to discuss specific aspects of the town’s history. Offering different channels of participation – on-site, online – allowed us to adapt to the variety of participants’ profiles and availability.

Figure 4.

Wood wagon used to collect objects all over the town.

We also collected new oral testimonies. Oral history offers ways to access and collect sources for individuals, groups, and topics that may be absent from official archives.Footnote ²⁰ Used since the 1930s to support a bottom-up and people history approach that includes ethnic minorities, oral history has been instrumental in fighting colonial structures in archival and historical production.Footnote ²¹ We used oral history to counter-balance the relative absence of sources about certain groups in municipal and national archives. Besides the preliminary oral history of the residents in the mural’s neighborhood, we identified groups and communities with whom we had little contact. For instance, while representing 15 percent of the whole population in the country, and close to one-third of the population in the Esch-sur-Alzette region, members of the Portuguese-speaking communities were relatively absent from the HistorEsch participants. Our next project Lovò is therefore based on a co-produced history of the town through the oral history of Portuguese-speaking grand-mothers.Footnote ²²

We collected 106 objects for the exhibition, around 60 photographs, and a dozen of oral testimonies about the history of Esch-sur-Alzette. The participatory process had clear consequences on the types of collected materials. For instance, very few objects dealt with political, economic, or cultural elites. Many more are related instead to the everyday life of ordinary people.Footnote ²³ Many objects – like a teddy bear (Figure 5) that belongs to Anna-Maria who immigrated from Italy to Esch-sur-Alzette when she was six – reflected a very personal understanding of the town’s past. Other objects were more rare from a historical perspective. For instance, one participant brought a wooden toy that had been made by one of the Ostarbeiters in the camps established by the Nazis to provide labour for local factories during the Second World War (Figure 6). The Ostarbeiter made the toy and gave it to the participant’s mother to thank her for sharing food during the war. Through that family object, the exhibition was able to include an aspect of the past that has been relatively absent from the official history.

Figure 5.

Teddy bear submitted online by Anna-Maria.

Figure 6.

Wooden toy designed by an Ostarbeiter during the Second World War. Collected during one of the workshops.

Public participation helped connect individual, family, and broader histories of Esch-sur-Alzette. We witnessed it concretely when participants brought friends and family members for the opening of the exhibition to show how their objects – a bike, a teddy bear, a cooking tool – and their memories and stories were now part of a public history of the town. Participants appropriating the history of the town contributed to not only disseminating historical research but also empowering members of the public.

Expertise and decision-making in participatory public history

One of the major challenges for participatory public history is to offer inclusive frameworks that combine different types of expertise and sometimes conflicting interpretations from a variety of partners. The participation of members of the public in the collecting as well as the interpreting of sources meant, by definition, the presence of a plurality of memories and perspectives. This plurality and diversity of voices helped to make the process less exclusively academic and more representative of the diversity of the public. It also raised questions about authority in the decision-making.Footnote ²⁴

HistorEsch was based on multiple types of combined expertise. For instance, the artist was responsible for proposing sketches and realizing the wall painting. Residents provided photographs, memories, and testimonies based on their living expertise. Other participants contributed as moderators, event organizers, or community “fixers” who act as vectors of public participation through their social expertise and knowledge of the local networks of communities.Footnote ²⁵ The combination of expertise in HistorEsch was based on mutual respect and clear acknowledgment of what every participant could bring to the project. For the university researchers, it also meant reflecting upon their assigned role in the project.

The role of professional historians – paid for their activities of historians – in participatory projects remains subject to many debates and has been at the core of the public history debates since the early 1980s.Footnote ²⁶ I see the historians doing public history as walking a fine line between two no-go zones. On the one hand, historians are not bringing historical truths to passive audiences. While few historians would work today as missionaries bringing knowledge to the masses, it is important to not act as simple providers of historical meanings. On the other hand, historical critical methodology is crucial to public history and public participation should not lead to any relativism. In other words, the participatory construction of history does not mean that all interpretations of the past are true or equally valid. Jim Gardner, an American historian who has practised public history for decades, insists on the difference between opinion and knowledge, with the latter – to which public history belongs – being a construction based on evidence and methodology.Footnote ²⁷ Historians should not completely disappear behind historical witnesses and participants.

Citizen science often includes quality control steps in which historians can take part. Rather than controlling, I see the role of professional historians as working at guaranteeing scientific frameworks in which participants can co-produce historical narratives. With the input from participatory design, we later called this process “infrastructuring public history.”Footnote ²⁸ This for instance leads historians to help participants come up with questions about the past. We set up a group of volunteers who would act as an advisory board for both the wall painting and the exhibition. The group was called the Citizen Historian Circle or CHiC. The group offered three types of expertise: lived expertise, research expertise, and community-network expertise. During the CHiC meetings, the historians helped frame the talk through an investigation of the past, coming up with questions on how the neighbourhood had changed over time. Questioning changes – when, why, how – was one of the most relevant tasks of the historians. Historians were also useful when additional information was needed regarding sites, events, and characters identified by the CHiC. For instance, the participants identified a former local airfield as one of the most authentic historical sites of the neighbourhood. The researchers were able to find and share historical images of what had been the first airfield in Luxembourg, with a direct connection with London for several decades. Information about the historical context was particularly useful for the artist to replace testimonies, family pictures, and documents with a broader understanding of the past. Helping to connect individual, family, and broader stories is perhaps the most critical role of professional historians in participatory projects. Mary Rizzo shows how the participation of historians in a participatory history project in Baltimore contributed to highlighting long and broad processes at play – though not clearly visible – in oral histories.Footnote ²⁹ Connecting individuals, groups, and broader contexts was particularly needed for the exhibition on the history of Esch-sur-Alzette in 25 family objects. As the texts accompanying the objects were co-written between the members of the CHiC, the donors of the objects, and local residents, it was important to make sure to show how individual stories were illuminating broader histories; a kitchen tool and Italian migration in the 1930s, a bike and the development of transportation and industrialization in the 1960s, a toy made in 1943 and the prisoners brought by the Nazis from the East to Luxembourg during the Second World War.

Decentralizing authority in public history also meant not knowing exactly what the project would look like. In HistorEsch, the level of control over the final product was limited. Project leaders – archivists, curators, and historians – usually have the power to select and decide what material is worth using, preserving, or interpreting. In HistorEsch, some steps in the decision-making process were collective and public. As demonstrated in the book The Public in Public History, practitioners have to engage more openly with the definitions and frames of what the term “public” means.Footnote ³⁰ For HistorEsch, one question was about who could take part in the decision-making. For the research part, the members of the CHiC were central and contributed to defining the historical themes of the wall painting and the five historical categories of the exhibition. Both for the wall painting and for the exhibition, local residents were involved in deciding what the project would be about. The artist designed six different sketches to serve as wall paintings and for which residents could vote. Similarly, 106 family objects had been collected for an exhibition in which only 25 could be on display. So who should be able to vote for the sketches and the selection of objects? Who could decide what representations of the town would be on display? Could anyone – even people who may have found the website online but who had absolutely no connection to or knowledge of the town – vote and decide equally with people who actually lived through and had a personal connection to the town’s history? Conversely, was it justified to restrict access to the voting – and if so, how? Although a small and humble project, HistorEsch raised questions about who can and should take part in and decide on participatory public history.

For the wall painting, the organizers and the member of the CHiC wanted to give some priorities to the residents of the neighborhood while also offering the possibility for other people interested in local history to vote. To give the people who actually live in the neighbourhood greater influence over the final decision, we gave more points (3) to votes collected on-site and through the local door-to-door canvassing process (Figure 7). Online voting was advertised through the Facebook group and each vote was equivalent to one point. While imperfect, the system of weighted votes mirrored the different levels of participation in the project.Footnote ³¹

Figure 7.

Voting station for the wall painting.

Decentralizing the decision-making process allowed us to fight the images of the elitist and isolated scholars that some members of the public may have. It also prevented researchers to work as gatekeepers and act instead more as facilitator of critical and participatory production of history. CHiC’s local residents were not simple contributors to the project but worked as active representatives of HistorEsch, presenting the project to the press.

Making the production of history more public aims to support accessibility, engagement, and participation. HistorEsch started as a research project at the University of Luxembourg and became a participatory experience in which skills, expertise, and knowledge were combined to produce more inclusive historical processes and narratives. Public history does not necessarily mean that all participants can equally take part in all steps of the research production, but it surely widens the opportunities for the members of the public to actively engage, contribute, coproduce, and reclaim historical narratives. Participation is key to make the members of the public to appropriate and help disseminate historical research. Making historical narratives more inclusive does not necessarily mean adding voices to official history but can mean bringing individual and group experiences, memories, and traces of the past to the fore of the public space. Identifying what histories, what topics, and what groups are present and absent from the overall production of history – in the archives, in the historiography, as participants – has been and will continue to be one of the most important roles of public history practitioners.