The Public Humanities got its name from the work it was designed to accomplish, providing education and awareness about history to the public. Some of the earliest practices of public, often referred to as applied history, show up in the early nineteenth century. This work laid the foundation for museum programs and federal preservation institutions.
In the realm of public humanities, the term "public" typically refers to a broad and diverse audience beyond academic circles. These individuals from various backgrounds and walks of life are interested in and engage with the humanities, including fields like history, literature, philosophy, and more. Public humanities aim to make these disciplines accessible and relevant to a broader audience, often through activities such as museum exhibitions, documentaries, public lectures, and community engagement projects.
The "public" can encompass people of all ages, educational backgrounds, and interests, emphasizing the importance of democratizing knowledge and cultural experiences. As a historian interested in public history and education, their work likely revolves around reaching and engaging with this diverse "public" to make the humanities more inclusive and accessible. The public is the community that you, as a historian, aim to serve and the people who hold you accountable as a historian. Another way of thinking about this concept is driven home by author Gregory Jay's piece, “The Engaged Humanities: Principles and Practices for Public Scholarship and Teaching.” Jay writes that “scholarship should not only address the concerns of the public, the marginalized, and the working class. It should also emerge in some way out of collaboration with them (Jay 53).”
In preparation for a public humanities project, Sheila Brennan suggests in her article “Public First” that “Identifying and collaborating with specific audiences helps public digital humanities projects be relevant, useful, and usable (Brennan 4).”
Ensuring your project is relevant and usable to your community is essential to getting a project off the ground. Whether it is funding or publicity for your project, the project needs to have an audience that it is built to cater to. This could look like bringing in community partners, doing oral histories in minority communities, and building relationships with historical societies and their volunteers.
So now, this begs the question of how we, as humanists, get the public involved in our work. My favorite way to involve the public is by interviewing them and capturing their stories from a first-person point of view. Not only does it make them aware of your work, but it involves them, and that goes a long way. They then have the ability to see the final product and get excited to show it off because it's a story they’re proud of - it is their story. The relationships you make in one project will outlast the span of the project itself and can even set up more public history projects for you to take on in the future.
Sources:
Sheila A. Brennan, “Public, First,” in Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, eds., Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 384-389: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/83 (open-access edition).
Gregory Jay, “The Engaged Humanities: Principles and Practices for Public Scholarship and Teaching,” Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship 3:1 (Spring 2010), pp. 51–63: http://jces.ua.edu/the-engaged-humanities-principles-and-practices-for- public-scholarship-and-teaching.