HST 209 PUBLIC HISTORY

MESSAGE FOR VISITORS AND GUESTS

Welcome to the HST209 Public History website, an ongoing experiment in on-line learning at Charles Sturt University.

HST209 Public History is offered to both internal (classroom) and external (distance education) students in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Students from both study modes and both levels access this site as their common on-line classroom.

You are welcome to tour our site. Some of the site is closed to outsiders; dummy pages have been provided in some places.

We appreciate any comments you may care to make about what we are trying to do. We make no claims that our website is especially "swish". It is a classroom experiment developed and maintained by the teacher, his students and HST209 supporters with limited official university assistance. In early 1999, HST209 received a Faculty of Arts award for its innovations in Distance Education, the proceeds of which have been used to purchase a digital camera for use with this website.

Your comments can be e-mailed to rmclachlan@csu.edu.au

• If you have arrived to participate in an arranged forum (tutorial), please click http://www.csu.edu.au/forums/HST209_Public/

• If you would like to read some more about HST209 as on-line experiment in learning, click here.

• For advice on navigating this site, click here.

• To begin your (unguided) visit to the site, click here.

The material below replicates the "Subject Overview" page as encountered by students using the restricted access website.

_{Subject Overview}

Your lecturer in Imperial Chinese robes at Sung Dynasty Village, Hong Kong

Subject coordinator: Robin McLachlan E-mail: rmclachlan@csu.edu.au Phone: (02) 6338 4350 Session offering: Spring 1999 Faculty: School of Social Science and Liberal Studies, Faculty of Arts Instructional design: Stephen Relf , Tom Lawson and Pauline Graf

Your Lecturer

Dr Robin McLachlan combines a Senior Lectureship (2/3 fractional appointment) in History and Cultural Heritage Studies at Charles Sturt University with occasional consulting and contract work in the history and heritage fields. Over the past decade, he has worked, as an individual or through his company, Times Past Productions, for a wide range of clients, including the Australian Bicentennial Authority, the Australian War Memorial, Port Arthur Historic Site, Cabonne Shire Council and the NSW Department of Public Works. His projects have included commissioned book histories, heritage reports, education programmes, exhibitions and computer-based products. In 1995, he was awarded a Britain-Australia Bicentennial Trust Fellowship to study Heritage Interpretation at the Ironbridge Institute, UK. Dr McLachlan is a member of the Professional Historians Association of NSW and the National Council on Public History (USA), as well as an executive member of the Bathurst Branch of the National Trust, Arts OutWest and the Bathurst District Historical Society.

In teaching HST209 Public History, he tries to combine his academic studies of Public History with his practical experience as a practicing "Public Historian".

_Aims

This subject provides an introduction to Public History through a critical assessment of how history is conceptualised and presented within, by and for the public sphere. Overall, the subject will investigate different ways in which people seek to know, to present and to understand their past in order to better understand the historical sensibilities of their own time and culture.

Although the focus of the subject will be on Australia, developments in other countries, especially the UK and the USA, will also be considered.

The main approach taken will be to explore public history, and related issues, through the study of some of:

• the many forms in which public history is commonly presented, together with
• the issues of meanings and policies to be found in these presentations.

_Forms

The forms of public history to be considered may include:

• Museums and their collections (Miss Traill's House and the National Museum of Australia);
• Heritage theme parks and precincts (Sovereign Hill and The Rocks, examples of "Cultural Tourism");
• Commemorations and anniversaries (the 1988 Bicentennial and the 2001 Federation Centenary);
• Heritage organisations (National Trust, Australian Heritage Commission, etc.);
• Film, TV and video, including fictional, semi-fictional and documentary; ("Gallipoli" and "The Civil War")
• Computer-based presentations (Internet and CD-ROM);
• Monuments and memorials (Australian War Memorial and the Frogmore Mystery Monument);
• Community history projects (local history books, clubs and events);
• "Celebratory" History (Commissioned histories and programs);
• Family History;
• Heritage Buildings and Historic Sites (Chifley Cottage and Ophir);
• Re-enactment events and societies ("The Sealed Knot").

Obviously, there is some overlapping within our simplistic understanding of "form". Nevertheless, this arrangement will assist us in identifying the appearance of "Public History" in the community and aid our exploring the issues the various forms best exemplify.

_Issues

The issues to be explored within these forms of public history may include:

• definitions of Public History, as well as its origin and history;
• the role of material culture (objects and places) in shaping and reflecting public understandings of the past;
• the role of public/private memory and remembering/forgetting in shaping and reflecting understandings of the past (oral history);
• the all-important question of ownership of the past;
• problems in seeking objectivity and "truth" in public history;
• problems of race, gender and class (non)representations in public history;
• contested pasts and the place of Public History in such contests;
• indigenous rights over indigenous artefacts and sites;
• the commercialisation & romanticisation of the past (Heritage Tourism);
• problems and issues of forming and implementing public policy in public history.

Exploring such issues will help develop your skills in critiquing or analysing existing examples of public history, as well as laying the basis for your own interpretive work as a public historian.

Clearly, some of the issues nominated above overlap or blend one into the other. The list, however, will provide some guidance as to the sort of questions we seek to explore and answer in this subject. Your first assignment, a critical review of a museum or similar heritage/historic venue, will require you to set and answer such questions for your assigned museum.

As well as asking critical questions of expressions of public history, the public historian (You!) should function as an advocate in the community on public history matters. Your work in the subject will provide the opportunity to develop some basic advocacy skills in public history. This activity will also develop some basic local history research skills, as well as practice in the preparation of a written submission. The advocacy exercise is a very important part of this subject.

_Objectives

To sum up, and to rephrase the above, upon completion of this subject students will have:

• A knowledge of the major forms in which public history is presented;
• A critical understanding of some of the main principles and current issues of public history;
• An ability to examine critically public presentations of history;
• An awareness of general principles of interpretation required for public history presentations;
• Basic skills in advocating, researching and presenting history in the public sphere;
• An awareness of the role of public history in contemporary cultures, both within and beyond Australia;
• An awareness of the role and place of official public policy in public history.

Official public policy, or cultural policy, is an especially important theme in this subject - and in Public History generally. Rarely will the subject of policy be absent from our weekly tutorial discussions.

HST 209 Public History will provide a grounding in the theory and methodology required for HST 307 Applied History.

CONFERENCE PAPERS ABOUT THE HST209 ON-LINE EXPERIMENT

• A condensed version of a paper presented at the 1997 AHC/CHC Conference (Glasgow, Scotland) discussing the initial phase of the HST209 Public History experiment in on-line teaching and learning is available. Just click here.
• A brief paper discussing the trial run of an on-line debate in 1998 is available. Just click here.
• The abstract of a paper offered for the 1999 CHC Conference (Skidmore College, NY, USA) is available. Just click here.

NAVIGATING YOUR WAY THROUGH HST209 PUBLIC HISTORY

If you want to get to the KEY LOCATIONS of our site, note these three buttons on the left side of the screen:

SCHEDULE: This will take you to the list of study topics in the subject and provide access to those topics. While you will be able to access all of the study topic material, the topic forums are not accessible to non-university people.

OVERVIEW: This will bring you back to this page.

ASSESSMENT: This provides information on assignments and assessment..

REMAINING BUTTONS AND LINKS: Please do explore; see where the buttons and links take you. In some places, you may find your progress barred as you are not a registered user of the CSU computer system. Some of the buttons and links are inoperative as they either no longer maintained or can only function from the subject website accessible only to CSU staff and students. The pages you are able to view are all located on a public access server. Because of resource limitations (my energy!) some public access pages are not up to date.