History Goes Public
The argument of this book so far assumes that historians have at their disposal the means to reach beyond their academic peers and their students. This proposition must now be put to the test. And because the weight of academic tradition has seriously questioned whether dissemination is feasible or even desirable, it is clear that searching questions must be asked. A gulf is usually said to exist between the academy and popular history, and for good reasons. The questions which interest the academic historian and a general lay readership often seem like oil and water. The language of the monograph is poles apart from that of the TV spin-off or the coffee-table book; and there is a sharp divergence as regards the rigour with which facts are established and arguments sustained.
The many faces of public history
Today, however, the distinction is not so sharp. There exist the makings of an alternative practice dedicated to crossing the gulf: public history. While still marginal to the academic profession, public history is taking an increasingly prominent profile, as measured by conferences, outreach activities and publications. But the term ‘public history’ needs to be used with care. Its scope is still uncertain. Ludmilla Jordanova has defined it to include all the means by which those who are not professional historians acquire their sense of the past, but as she concedes, this is very much an umbrella definition.1 It conflates highly disparate activities whose only common ground is that they modify the traditional relationship between professional and lay history in some way. Of course that common factor is highly significant, but it means very different things to the various constituencies who are brought together under the umbrella of public history. In one register public history refers to everything that professional historians do to bring their work to public attention – through journalism, TV programmes or policy advice. In another register it refers to historical work carried out in conjunction with museums and other heritage bodies, partly in pursuit of a conservationist agenda and partly in order to promote the public consumption of the visible and tangible relics of the past.
In yet another register, public history refers to historical work carried out in the community by lay people through oral history, family history and other community projects. Here the role of the professional historian is one of support and advice, working alongside amateurs, often on their terms. History Workshop during its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s was a notable instance of this convergence between amateur and professional, bringing together trade unionists, feminists, freelance writers and academics. Indeed, the project of a democratised public history is now sufficiently established for historians to study it as a cultural phenomenon in its own right, most notably in Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (1994).2 Yet in the last resort, professional historians are peripheral to these endeavours. The initiative generally lies with the community, who sometimes have a strong sense of ownership of ‘their’ past; scholars only assist and advise.
At the other extreme from this community-based activity is history written for corporate bodies and the public authorities. This aspect of historians’ outreach has been a marked feature of the United States. There too, public history means different things, but the most robust – and certainly the best funded – kind has been historical work commissioned by government departments and private corporations. Public history began in the mid-1970s in somewhat inauspicious circumstances. American academia was experiencing a jobs crisis as university appointments failed to match the big rise in doctoral enrolments. Public history was a means of enhancing the status of trained historians who might have expected an academic career but found themselves working for non-academic employers. As one exponent put it, ‘Public history is the adaptation and application of the historian’s skills and outlook for the benefit of private and public enterprises.’3 Developing a business culture loomed large in the house journal The Public Historian, founded in 1978. By the 1980s, most government departments in America employed historians on a substantial scale. Although the label ‘public history’ was new, the practice dated back to the New Deal, when archival work was promoted by the federal government on a large scale. During the Second World War, 54 government agencies employed professional historians to write an objective record of their activities before it was overlaid by the tumult of events. But in the 1980s, the growth area was policy advice. Historians were employed to investigate the circumstances in which a specific policy had originated and to evaluate a range of policy options.4
This vein of public history is also found in Britain, but to a much smaller extent. One of the reasons why British historians tend not to label themselves exclusively as ‘public historians’ is that very few of them are employed in the public sphere; whatever public history they do is only a small part of their professional activities, which continue to be located in the academy. Major corporations like Unilever and Reuters have employed historians, but their remit is to write company histories rather than to advise on policy. The government also employs historians, but sparingly and only in certain departments. Not surprisingly the Foreign Office, with its concern for diplomatic precedent, has the most strongly felt need of ‘departmental memory’.5 During the First World War, it employed historical advisers. The young Charles Webster was commissioned to write an account of the Congress of Vienna of 1815 as orientation for the ‘officials and men of action’ who were making peace at Versailles.6 The Foreign Office set up a full-scale Historical Branch in 1944, which now comprises nine historians. Their principal role is to prepare the official documentary history of British foreign policy, but they also give historical advice to officials when asked. This is usually in connection with some historical controversy which has entered public debate and is causing embarrassment to ministers: one such case was an alleged cover-up regarding the disposal of ‘Nazi gold’ in 1996.7 The Cabinet Office also employs historians. On the other hand, the Department of Health does not, despite the strong element of historical continuity in certain areas of policy, like the management of public health scares.8 Whether the availability of historical expertise in government departments actually improves the quality of policymaking is open to question. Historians who have penetrated behind the Whitehall façade are not impressed. Zara Steiner concludes, ‘No Foreign Ministry has yet found a satisfactory way effectively to bring past memory and record as construed by historians into the policy-making process.’9 Alix Green points out that this is likely to remain the case as long as historians are a breed apart from the rest of the civil service. In her view the effective contribution of historical expertise depends on the embedding of historical thinking into the mindset of the policymakers themselves – a major change in training which has not yet been adopted.10
More to the point is whether government-sponsored history should be regarded as public history at all. Confidential historical advice is not intended to reach the public domain and seldom does so. Published official histories are in a different position, but they may serve as a smokescreen rather than to enlarge the effec-tiveness of public scrutiny. On the other hand, such histories may genuinely enlarge the sum total of evidence available to the public. This was certainly true of the multivolume publication of British documents on the origins of the First World War, which was commissioned from G. P. Gooch by Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald in 1924.11 But the suspicion remains that historians working for government or corporations have their hands tied. Commitment to public enlightenment takes second place to institutional affiliation. It is more faithful to the spirit of the phrase to confine ‘public history’ to work which is directly addressed to the public.12 Without a customer or a paymaster, the historian is then placed in the much more challenging position of striving to reach a lay audience.
Each of the models of public history discussed so far has its place in the practice of historians. Governments and corporations should certainly not be denied historical advice on the grounds that the political virtue of the scholar may be impugned. At the other end of the scale, academic historians have a role alongside the amateur and the activist in crafting histories which speak to the community – understood both in its general sense and as an expression of identity politics. Yet neither fully accommodates the core activities of the professional scholar. It is hardly stretching the meaning of the term to assert that public history includes the dissemination of work which, while carried out in the academy, speaks to public concerns. Communicating the findings of professional historians through the written word and the broadcast media is no less ‘public history’ than the grass-roots investigations of the amateur. Both are means whereby the non-historian acquires knowledge about the past. Of course the outreach work of academics does not necessarily promote critical debate. Much of it treats history as entertainment: the good story, the alluring ambience, the historical who-done-it. Occasionally (as during the First World War), historians have put their names to outright propaganda. My concern in this chapter is with critical public history, by which I mean historical writing which addresses a general readership with the intention of fuelling public debate: in short, a history for citizens.
The tradition of public history in Britain
What then does it mean to treat the findings of professional scholars as ‘public history’? What is the framework in which historians can disseminate or popularise their findings? How can they define a relationship with the public which is neither didactic nor subservient? These are not new questions, and the varied ways in which they have been answered in the past are suggestive. Before the professionalisation of history in the nineteenth century, historians were expected to address the educated public in terms which resonated with current politics, and they regularly did so – from Clarendon in the seventeenth century to Macaulay in the mid-nineteenth. It is sometimes supposed that the austere disavowal of topicality by Ranke and his followers brought this tradition to an end. In fact, Ranke was far from being the undisputed model, and historians who practised ‘history for its own sake’ worked alongside others who loudly proclaimed the relevance of their discipline. The widely read Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley maintained that ‘history is the school of statesmanship’, and he certainly regarded his studies in the history of British colonial expansion in this light.13
During the first half of the twentieth century, three distinct kinds of public engagement stand out. In a category by himself was G. M. Trevelyan, the most widely read historian of the century. In works like the History of England (1926), he aimed to reprise the achievement of his great-uncle, Lord Macaulay, not only in sales but in celebrating the unique political and social development of Britain and the unique national virtues which had made this possible: resilience, calmness and love of liberty. David Cannadine, his biographer, speaks of Trevelyan’s achievement as a ‘public educator’, and Trevelyan conceived this role in the broadest terms.14 History was a humane education which could illumine the present, but it did not furnish context or perspective for any current preoccupation. What Trevelyan communicated was an increasingly negative stance towards industrialism, urbanisation and democracy. The past became a refuge rather than a means of engaging critically with the contemporary world.15
The second strand of what would now be called ‘public history’ focused on international affairs. British interpretations of events in continental Europe between the Wars were heavily influenced by the issue of war guilt. If Germany was to blame for the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles appeared a just settlement. If Germany’s responsibility was no greater than anyone else’s, it followed that Germany had been treated too harshly and was justified in contesting the treaty. Historical interpretation was at the heart of this controversy. G. P. Gooch led the pro-German camp; R. W. Seton-Watson maintained a more critical position towards the Central Powers. That British opinion swung during the 1930s to an anti-Versailles position was in some measure due to the intervention of historians like Gooch.16
The third strand of public engagement focused on social and economic questions. It was strongly associated with the left and with one historian in particular – R. H. Tawney. Tawney undertook a number of commissions from the government, but it was his lay readership that mattered most to him and which made his reputation. He wrote both ‘relevant’ history and works of social criticism which drew on historical perspective. Tawney believed that economic history – unlike political history – spoke to the lives of ordinary people, like the working men to whom he had taught the subject early in his career. His most influential publication was Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). Christian economic thought before and during the English Reformation might seem an unlikely theme for a book with such a wide readership, but it was an effective position from which to promote a critical debate about the detachment of social ethics from the conduct of business in modern capitalism. Whatever the rights or wrongs of church involvement in economic questions in the modern world, Tawney demonstrated that it was manifestly false to dismiss it as a modern innovation. In the same way Tawney bolstered his discourse on equality with a cogent historical account of how the characteristic forms of present-day inequality had come about.17
Trevelyan, Gooch and Tawney wrote as individuals, and they would have bridled at the suggestion that they ‘spoke for history’. But they did work against a background of professional support for ‘relevant’ history. The Historical Association was founded in 1906 partly in order to counter the lack of historical perspective in national and imperial matters. A. F. Pollard, the first editor of its journal History, aimed ‘to bring the light of history to bear in the study of politics, … to test modern experiment by historical experience’.18 That objective continued to be met between the wars, when the Association was in the thick of public debates about foreign policy and the League of Nations. In the second half of the century, the profession ceased to identify with any public function outside the educational system. The Historical Association was no longer concerned with the ‘usable’ past; as Keith Robbins has remarked, its journal ‘sounded a more severely “professional” note’.19
The main exception to this post-war retreat from relevance was the Marxist historians, whose influence was greatest between the 1960s and 1980s. They produced one public historian of com-manding stature. E. P. Thompson dominated the lay readership of social history even more than Tawney had done in the 1930s. Like Tawney, his ability to connect with a wide audience was grounded in his experience of teaching in adult extension classes: how otherwise could he have had the confidence to address a 900-page account of the English working class to the labour movement and working people? In The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Thompson was manifestly partisan and quick to make morally loaded judgements. He identified with the exploited and applauded the courage of the activist. But if the book falls into the category of identity history, it was not a triumphalist narrative. Rather it took the form of a sequence of essays which reflected on both the human realities of industrialisation and the diverse cultures of those who raised their voices in protest.
Professional historians in the public sphere
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, nobody dominates public history in the way that Trevelyan, Tawney and Thompson once did. Yet the number of historians who from time to time work to a public agenda is much larger, and they can choose between a wider range of media, including the Internet and television (see Chapter 7). Their work affords ample illustration of the main purposes which a critical public history can serve. From the perspective of academic historians, the least controversial of these is the disposing of myth. It places a premium on their distinctive critical armoury, and it can be applied impartially to the distortions of left and right. ‘I should like to be the counterpart of the eye-surgeon’, says Theodore Zeldin, ‘specialising in removing cataracts.’20 William Wilberforce’s supposedly single-handed achievement in bringing to an end the Atlantic slave trade would be one such myth – matched by the countervailing belief that the trade was brought to an end by slave resistance. Britain’s role in the Second World War also provides ample illustrative material. Dunkirk stands not only for the ingenuity of the British people in retreating in order to triumph in the future, but also for the supposed perfidy of their allies, the French and Belgians. The truth was that all three countries had been soundly defeated by the Germans. The popular version of Dunkirk is grist to the mill of the more xenophobic aspects of Euroscepticism.21
As the previous chapter demonstrated, historical myths also prevail in the field of social policy. Margaret Thatcher’s espousal of ‘Victorian values’ gave historians an important corrective role to perform. Their public response was prompt and cogent. The New Statesman published a special supplement in which seven historians took issue with her interpretation. The contribution by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall dealt crisply with the hidden oppres-sions of the nineteenth-century bourgeois family (four years before they published their major work on this theme22). James Walvin acted as consultant to a Granada TV series on Victorian values and published a spin-off book.23 A little later, History Today carried a series of articles on specific Victorian themes. Most impressive of all, Michael Anderson brought to bear his immense demographic knowledge of the nineteenth-century family, writing effective critiques in The Guardian and New Society. His piece in New Society asked, ‘What lessons in understanding our own society can the Victorian family offer us?’ His analysis was couched in terms of a cautionary tale: to wish to live in Victorian times was ‘a dangerous illusion’. The most important lesson from family history, he said, was that ‘new institutions and new expectations’ need to be developed to cope with new situations.24 Professions of belief in public history are too often cast in vague terms. Here we can see how the task was undertaken in circumstances which pitched historians against the political wisdom of the day.25
Some scholars take the view that the discrediting of myth is the only legitimate public role for the historian.26 But public history has positive functions also. The role of a keeper of public memory is not only to correct false memories but to ensure that significant facets of the past are brought into play as and when they speak to present-day concerns. This is particularly true of painful or disturbing episodes which have previously been forgotten or suppressed. The rejoinder ‘Why weren’t we told?’ captures the recognition that what has come to light shifts the moral landscape. That question forms the title of a book by the historian Henry Reynolds about settler–Aborigine relations in Australia, in which he documents the draconian policies pursued towards Australia’s indigenous population.27 Similar reactions have greeted revelations about the history of slavery in the United States.28 There is much comparable material in Britain’s colonial past. The publication in 2005 of two books about counter-insurgency in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s – ‘Britain’s gulag’ as one of them calls it – elicited the reaction that this is a history which people in Britain ‘need to know’ in order to come to a just conclusion about the process of decolo-nisation in Africa and in order to grasp something of the trauma from which many Kikuyu still suffer.29 In cases such as these, the past appears in a disturbingly alien light, revealing aspects of our own society that we would prefer not to acknowledge. If historians do not recover such material, it is hard to know who will.
Sometimes historians are called upon to bear witness to uncom-fortable truths in the formal setting of the courtroom or the public inquiry. This is a mode of public history which has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years. The effect of courtroom procedure is to highlight the validation of facts at the expense of the web of context and interpretation which may determine their significance. This is likely to reduce the historian to an ancillary role. But in some cases historical facts and the correct use of the research procedures which establish those facts are the very point at issue. Such was the case in the libel case brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 2000. Irving maintained that Lipstadt, in alleging Holocaust denial, had libelled him. Lipstadt’s defence was based on the claim that Irving’s statements about the Holocaust were false. Because Irving maintained that his views were borne out by archival evidence, the defence was compelled to scrutinise his research procedures. To that end, it retained the services of the historian Richard J. Evans. In tracing Irving’s statements back to the documents on which they purportedly rested, Evans demonstrated that he had repeatedly flouted accepted procedures and mis-translated documents. His findings were central to the judgement in favour of the defence. The case had considerable significance not only because it placed Irving in a very negative light, but also because it weakened the plausibility of Holocaust denial.30
It is rare for a case to turn on one person’s research methods in this way. More commonly, historians appear in courts or tribunals where their expertise may have some relevance but where they are unlikely to hold the outcome in their hands. The Saville Tribunal in Northern
Ireland is a case in point. Set up by the British Government in 1998, the remit of the Tribunal was to determine what happened on Bloody Sunday in Derry on 30 January 1972. The main role of the two historical advisors nominated by the tribunal was to scrutinise public documents released in breach of the 30-year rule, some of which contained new material. They had far less to do with the statements of witnesses and the courtroom confrontations. Paul Bew (one of the historical advisors) concludes that the value of retaining historians is that they are more disinterested than the lawyers, and – unlike the public – they know that the findings of the tribunal will still be provisional and flawed.31 That is a relatively upbeat judgement. Historians’ experience of other public forums has been less happy. It has not been unknown for scholars to be hand-picked to support a particular case and to pronounce on questions which in the light of the evidence are unknowable.32 The Irving case makes the point that, for historians, entering the public lists may involve rubbing shoulders with distasteful company. Most academics would prefer to debate with those who know and respect the rules of the game. But given that charlatans and cranks have access to the public ear, it is all the more important that historians expose them for what they are.
In illuminating events like Mau Mau or the Holocaust, historians are of course coming to grips not only with another time but another society. Here their educational role is of great importance given the limited knowledge which the public in Britain (or most other countries) has of the rest of the world. Without some grasp of the historical forces which have been at work, foreign societies remain just that: foreign. Popular media comment on other countries rests on two assumptions: that their actions ought to be a ‘rational’ response to the present; and if they are judged otherwise, this is taken to be confirmation of the second assumption, that ‘they’ are fundamentally ‘other’ and unintelligible. Seeing these societies in historical perspective provides an essential foundation for interpreting the actions of their leaders and the social and cultural forces which they represent. During Africa’s ‘decade of independence’ in the 1960s, British Africanists not only trained African research students and assisted the new African universities; they wrote for a lay readership in Britain. The Short History of Africa which Roland Oliver wrote with J. D. Fage for Penguin in 1962 provided essential perspective for the unfocussed popular engagement with the continent. It brought into public awareness for the first time the scale of Africa’s Medieval empires, the full legacy of the slave trade – both European and Islamic – and the foundations of African nationalism.
But history not only provides an analytical window on the present; it also gives a vital insight into the political culture of all societies, but especially those societies which outsiders find hard to comprehend. The key is social memory – the body of beliefs about the past which a community holds in common, which sustains its sense of identity and which is transmitted by cultural means. The priority attached to cultural solidarity means that the content of social memory reflects a highly selective take on the past. In any social or political conflict, the participants carry conflicting histories in their heads, their precise inflection ranging from the triumphalism associated with past victories to a sense of grievance born of defeat. Social memory is now the subject of a great deal of historical work. Historians are the people best qualified to understand how the past is refracted into so many cultural variants and why they are often at odds with one another.33
The break-up of Yugoslavia brought these issues into focus. The acute tensions dividing Serb from Albanian, and Orthodox from Muslim, were rooted in the 600-year old conflict between Christians and Ottoman Turks, the policies of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and above all the trauma arising from the bitter civil conflict between fascists and communists during the Second World War.34 As the Yugoslav tragedy unfolded in the 1990s, historians had a twofold contribution to make. At one level they were in a position to shed light on the historical forces which had brought the south Slav lands to their present predicament. The war in Bosnia was widely regarded in Britain as a civil war based on ancient hatreds. In a timely historical account, Noel Malcolm pointed out how this assumption led the West to misjudge the measures for bringing the conflict to an end. In Malcolm’s view the dynamic elements were not traditional animosities within Bosnian society, but Serbian interference and Western ignorance: ‘Paradoxically, the most important reason for studying Bosnia’s history is that it enables one to see that the history of Bosnia in itself does not explain the origins of this war.’35 At another level, the intensity of the strife in Yugoslavia needed to be explained in terms of social memory: the tendency of today’s participants to situate their actions in a narrative which extended back to selected events during the Second World War, and even (in the case of many Serbs) to the epic defeat by the Turks at Kosovo Polje in 1389. Without some grasp of this extensive cultural hinterland, the succession wars of Yugoslavia made little sense.
None of the approaches I have discussed so far implies a limitation of period. Painful sensitivities about the past are not confined to World War II. Many questionable myths relate to the remote past (like Kosovo Polje) and are often valued the more for that reason. The most illuminating perspectives on foreign societies are often those which draw on an extended timescale. It is also sometimes forgotten that Medieval and early modern history often provide essential material for testing the supposed timelessness of what is deemed to be ‘natural’ or ‘traditional’. Nevertheless, the claim on historians of the recent past – or contemporary history – is particularly strong. ‘The day before yesterday’ is the black hole of popular consciousness – the period which is too recent to have been studied in school and yet too remote to be accurately remembered. The time frame of contemporary history is relative. For the older generation, it means anything since the end of the Second World War; for younger people the twilight zone is more likely to begin with the taking down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Accepted notions of the shape and direction of change during the past generation or so tend to be confused and simplistic, and thus much subject to political manipulation. In this context historical perspective is all the more valuable. Enquiry into historical topics which bear closely on the present, or which remain unresolved, is the rationale for contemporary history – what Hobsbawm terms ‘the history of the present’.36
An immense fillip was given to the writing of contemporary history by the dramatic and unpredicted collapse of the communist bloc between 1989 and 1992. Most observers agreed that the world had been changed in a fundamental way: a page of history had been turned. But the real significance of these events could only be plumbed by a long backward glance – reaching back to 1945 or even earlier. 1989 effected a kind of closure on the post-war era. The benefit of hindsight could be brought to bear on the processes and structures of the previous generation.
In just over 10 years, three major attempts at re-evaluation were made. Eric Hobsbawm’s was the first. Throughout his long career, Hobsbawm practised what he called haute vulgarization, by which he meant syntheses which foreground the major inte-grating themes of history for an intelligent lay audience. These include a sequence of three volumes on the ‘long’ nineteenth century in Europe (1780–1914) and an economic history of Britain since 1750.37 By 1989, Hobsbawm was stressing that historians’ top priority was to tackle the history of the world since 1945, and he followed his own counsel.38 The Age of Extremes (1994) is a history of the ‘short’ twentieth century, from the First World War to the collapse of communism. Hobsbawm delineates the shape of the century in two ways. It was the century of the Russian Revolution, in that the period of its global influence extended over almost the entire century. Communism provided capitalism with the means of saving itself from the Depression, and it made possible the defeat of the Third Reich. The year 1992 represented the final exit of the Russian Revolution from world history. In another sense Hobsbawm sees the century as a triptych – two periods of great instability enclosing a golden age between 1947 and 1973, when the world experienced unprecedented economic and social advance.
Two more recent accounts shift the emphasis from long-term structures to the play of contingency. In Mark Mazower’s view, if 1989–92 witnessed the triumph of democracy in Europe, this was not the fulfilment of an enlightened destiny, but the consequence of ‘narrow squeaks and unexpected twists’.39 Such a past should be a warning against complacency about the future of democratic societies. In Postwar (2005) Tony Judt took a similar view of the play of accident, but he highlighted the implications for historical consciousness. The lives of Europeans after 1945 had been fundamentally changed by the dictators and their wars, he said, but they could only be reconciled to this by suppressing much painful wartime experience. The year 1989 ended ‘post-war’ and removed the self-censorship of collective memory, making many grievances insistently audible for the first time.40 As Mazower puts it, ‘Understanding where we stand today requires not only seeing how the present resembles the past but how it differs from it as well.’41 Both Judt and Mazower are unimpressed by the prospects for a new equilibrium in Europe; stability is less secure than it seems.
Combating AIDS: Public history in a time of panic
The range of examples given in this chapter, spanning international, national and social issues, certainly demonstrates the role that historians can play in deepening public understanding of the world. But none of these books is offered as a practical guide to what should or should not be done. Can historians go further and draw out the policy implications of their insights into the past? And will that have any impact on how policy is actually made or perceived? Before considering why such questions are not at the heart of the current debates about public history, it is worth recalling one instance in recent British history when both were answered in the affirmative. This was the debate in the mid 1980s about what measures should be taken to counter the AIDS epidemic.
Public alarm was intense. It was stoked up by the much higher incidence of AIDS on the other side of the Atlantic: where America led the way, Britain was sure to follow. By 1986, there was intense paranoia in the media, and what one historian has called a grande peur among civil servants and politicians, even though only 610 cases had been recorded by that date.42 The panic was intensified by the belief that this was uncharted territory. No one could recall a time when there had been a lethal sexually transmitted disease of this magnitude. Medical history suddenly seemed relevant in the most practical way. There was prompt recognition of this in government circles: the Health Secretary, Norman Fowler, got in touch with the Wellcome Institute with an urgent request for any relevant historical expertise.43 The historian who led the response was Roy Porter, a leading authority on the social history of medicine. But Porter was not content with securing the ear of officials. In a crisis which was driven by public panic, he recognised the importance of reaching a wider audience. Porter threw himself into a campaign of public education. He wrote articles for the weekly press, like New Society. He even wrote a signed editorial for the British Medical Journal.44
What was at issue? Public support was mounting for compulsion in the fight against AIDS, by making it a notifiable disease, and the fact that AIDS was seen as primarily a ‘gay plague’ made this draconian solution more acceptable to the public at large. Others regarded this course as an infringement of civil liberties. Porter and his colleagues demonstrated that compulsion was not only that but also an ineffective way of stemming the spread of a contagious disease. Porter drew on precedents dating back to the plague in early modern England, but his strongest argument rested on Victorian precedent. In the light of high levels of venereal infection among soldiers and sailors, there had then been a vigorous debate about the respective weight that should be given to public health measures and individual rights. In the 1860s, the Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts were intended to curtail the spread of venereal disease by requiring suspected prostitutes in designated districts to be medically inspected and then detained until they were free of infection. The Acts unleashed major opposition from civil libertar-ians and feminists, and medical opinion declared that they were unworkable. They were repealed 20 years later. The implication was that compulsion would be no more effective in the fight against AIDS. Perhaps the British Government would anyway have settled on a policy of voluntarism in 1987, but historians played a significant part in preparing public opinion for this outcome.45
On the face of it, Porter’s citing of the CD Acts looks like a crude and superficial analogy: why should mid-Victorian anxieties have any relevance a hundred years on? What justified the analogy was the degree of historical continuity. In most historical epochs, sexually transmitted diseases have been stigmatised, and sufferers have therefore seldom been prepared to divulge them. In that respect British society in the 1980s differed little from that of the 1860s. The precedent of the CD Acts was a telling indicator of what can happen when measures of compulsion are adopted which antago-nise the very people whose cooperation is essential for containing the disease. This was hardly a new insight, as the lines of debate between voluntarism and compulsion were already established, but it needed to be clearly and calmly stated at a time of acute public alarm.
The circumstances of this case were highly distinctive. Historical insight is seldom regarded as an urgent practical requirement, and government ministers do not often demand immediate input from historians. The popular taste for historical analogy, so often condemned by historians, here proved fruitful (see Chapter 4). Still more unusual was the public tone adopted by Roy Porter: ‘History says no to the policeman’s response to AIDS’ ran the title of his British Medical Journal editorial.46 Very few historians would dare to be as prescriptive as that. But an increasing number are prepared to be explicit about the practical significance of their findings. Where historians have made the most significant contribution is in the field of social policy. This is because so many policies in the social field turn out to be adapted from initiatives in the past – sometimes the distant past. Pat Thane’s Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (2000) draws on some 600 years of social history. Several rosy-tinted images of the position of old people in the past bite the dust. Modern welfare provision is also conditioned by the past – in the British case by the Poor Law, which lasted from the early seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. One reason why the level of the state pension in Britain today lags behind other European countries is that under the Poor Law aged recipients of relief received only the barest minimum for subsistence. The long time frame employed by Thane also enables her to demonstrate the striking continuity in many aspects of ageing in British society. Thus old people in the past did not expect, or want, to share the homes of their grown-up offspring; they preferred to maintain their independence for as long as possible; then as now, they often became a charge on the public purse as a result. The historical record also suggests that policymakers should place only a qualified faith in demographic projections. As recently as the 1930s and 1940s, authoritative projections anticipated a steep fall in the British population over the next generation, and a corresponding rise in the proportion of over-65s to 30 per cent. As Thane points out, a buoyant birth rate and rising immigration put paid to that forecast, and a similar fate may lie in wait for today’s doom-laden predictions.47
History and policy
Thane’s work is unusual in being structured round today’s policy dilemmas. In fact, historians do a great deal of work which has a bearing on policy without being presented as such. Some of it is taken up in government publications, but as noted earlier such work is always open to the suspicion of trimming to the official line. A well-informed civic discourse is better served by the independent commissioning of publications which present historical research in an accessible policy-related way. A group of historians acting in this way can highlight policy areas of urgent priority; they can also draw attention to the role which applied historical thinking can play in a critical public discourse.
The first venture of this sort in Britain was the Historical Handbooks published by Faber between 1986 and 1991. The series featured concise historical accounts of particular policy areas – unemployment, housing, the punishment of offenders and so on. Most of these books were content to trace the evolution through time of their particular theme and to take note of different approaches to policy revealed by the historical record. The volumes conveyed little sense of how current policy might be informed by these studies. Avner Offer, the driving force behind the series, was well acquainted with the public history movement in the United States, and he had hoped for a sharper sense of ‘applied history’. In the event he had considerable difficulty in getting his authors to step outside the ‘history as background’ mode.48 For most of them this was all that could be demanded of historical expertise.49 There was little in the Handbooks to strain the conventions of historical detachment.
This caution is less in evidence in the most recent British attempt to bring historical scholarship to bear on issues of public concern. The History & Policy website (www.historyandpolicy.org) was founded in 2003 by Alastair Reid and Simon Szreter. It is the only ongoing Internet resource in Britain to provide historical perspective on an up-to-date range policy issues. It was planned as an independent academic venture with the dual intention of influencing the formation of government policies and informing public debate. Since then it has posted nearly 200 short papers by historians.
Some of the most telling contributions concern international relations. Afghanistan is a case in point. Stephanie Cronin has addressed the prospects for military stability in that country, on which U.S. plans for an exit strategy depend. As with most Afghan regimes since the 1830s, the support base of the government has veered from a modern Western-style army to militias and irregulars drawn from the tribal areas. Reforming the army has been too costly without foreign assistance (whether British, American or Soviet), but receiving outside help undermines the army’s legitimacy. As a result, in 1928 and 1992 the army disintegrated, leaving the field open to tribal elements. Cronin concludes that this seesaw is likely to characterise Afghanistan’s future after Western forces have finally left.50
Christopher Andrew draws on an even longer timescale. The ‘war on terror’ after 2001 has generally been thought to be directed at a new kind of terrorist, motivated by religious as much as political objectives, and intent on destruction rather than persuasion. Andrew, who has written extensively on the history of the intelligence services, explains how after 9/11 U.S. intelligence assessed the novelty of Al-Qaeda by measuring it against the secular terrorism they knew well – for example the IRA. Yet ‘holy terror’ has a much longer history, dating back to earlier movements in the Middle East and the religious wars of early modern Europe. Even before 9/11, Andrew was noting ‘a resurgence of traditional and cult-based terrorism’.51 The pool of experience available to those conducting the ‘war on terror’ runs deeper than the intelligence world seems to be aware.
However, the main emphasis of the History & Policy website has been on issues within the United Kingdom. In an early paper on the site, John Bew sought to counter the reductionist polarisation of politics in Northern Ireland by invoking an earlier Unionist tradition of creative and outward-looking thinking, symbolised by the prominent role played by the Ulster Presbyterians in the 1798 rebellion. Bew was not suggesting that the world of the nineteenth-century Protestant radicals could be recreated today; rather, he intended to make the point that there could be more to Unionism than the embattled sectarian version which was still dominant in 2003. That proved to be a prescient interpretation when the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive was formed in 2007. It needs to be kept in mind even when sectarian rivalry appears to be all-prevailing in the province, as has been the case since the collapse of the executive in 2017.52
Topics like international terrorism, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland engage with some of the top priorities of political discourse. But History & Policy also addresses social and cultural themes which have less bearing on policy and even less historical traction with the public. Laura King’s paper on fatherhood makes a topical case for paternity leave and a reform of the child custody law. But more provocatively she also pricks the bubble of complacency which is attached to the contemporary image of the hands-on father. Modern practice is less innovative than is widely supposed. Fatherhood in the Victorian period was far more diverse than the grim and reticent stereotype allows. In the twentieth century the pace of change quickened well before the most recent generation: King shows that before the Second World War men’s relations with their children were improving as family size contracted and working hours were reduced. She concludes that without this revised perspective we are in danger of overstating the innovations in men’s fathering today. Greater progress might be made if the lifestyle of fathers in the past was not so readily written off.53
The History & Policy papers demonstrate, once again, that the most convincing and illuminating perspectives on the present come from applying the core principles of historicism. They either develop an analysis in terms of historical process (as Cronin does), or they reason analogically while taking full account of historical difference and historical context (as Andrew does). Some papers qualify the presumption of novelty and innovation in current practice (as King does). Others again draw on the legacy of the past to broaden the possibilities in the present (as Bew does). What the 200-odd History & Policy papers clearly demonstrate is the extraordinary range of policies and preoccupations on which historians have something illuminating to say.
* * * * * * * *
The common feature of the historical work reviewed in this chapter is that it originated in academia but was placed before a wider audience in the belief that it also addresses topical issues of public concern. As such, it falls under the heading of public history. The practitioners whom I have described are not usually referred to as ‘public historians’ because that would suggest – as it does in the United States – full-time commitment to public partners and lay audiences. ‘Historians in public’ better conveys the British pattern of university academics venturing into the public sphere when their expertise holds particular relevance.54 Alix Green’s call for ‘history with public purpose’ captures something of the same approach.55 As shown in Chapter 1, outreach work by academics is far from being the only form of public history. Indeed, common usage usually implies a working association between academics and community historians; occasionally academics drop out of the frame altogether. Yet a comprehensive public history requires not only the contribution of academics to community projects, but the free access of the public to the findings of historical scholarship. At present the varied and constantly expanding body of academic knowledge is the least exploited element in public history. How that situation might be rectified is the subject of the final chapter.