History occupies such an assured and long-standing place in our literary and visual culture that it is easy to take it for granted and to ignore its civic significance. Why History Matters has argued that historical scholarship has a great deal to offer the democratic culture of British society. Its contribution is best understood in the context of citizenship. On all sides it is conceded that the exercise of citizenship in Britain is a shadow of what it might be. Taking a considered and informed view on matters of public concern is fundamental to the actions expected of the citizen – in the polling booth, in political parties, and in issue-led association with other citizens. To be effective, representative democracy needs to be deliberative, for which a certain level of relevant knowledge and critical acumen is required. This book has sought to demonstrate that an enlarged scope for public history would be a major step toward these goals.
That there exists some kind of link between historical education and citizenship has long been a commonplace, with material consequences for what children study in school. But the link is too often narrowly conceived within a grid of identity politics, with history cast in the role of endorsing political loyalties – to nation, community or ethnic group. This approach seriously underplays the civic importance of history. Its true remit is much wider and more open-ended, committed not to a particular political vision, but to understanding the societies we live in. Without the insights of applied history, we must be content with living on the surface of things, unable to grasp how our world has come to be, or to detect the direction in which it is moving.
The first practical claim of history on our attention is as an inventory of past experience. History offers unparalleled riches in this respect because the past – even the recent past – was different from the present. Far from condemning history to irrelevance, that principle of difference is what explains history’s continuing capacity to instruct and to unsettle – by bringing accumulated experience to bear on current problems and reminding us of missed opportunities and paths not taken. History gives us the salutary experience of being startled by the peculiarity of our own age. Sometimes its impact is inspirational, as with the Victorians’ preoccupation with the Middle Ages. Sometimes it is technical, as in the case of the many precedents which exist for different emphases in our welfare policies. The tension between the familiar and the strange with which history constantly confronts us is what helps us to find our feet in the world of today, by indicating what is enduring, as against what is new and possibly transient. This central precept informs the way historians deal with historical analogy. Much favoured by the media as a means of closing down debate, analogies are more useful as a means of highlighting the divergence between situations which share some features in common; in this way the distinctiveness of the present is more accurately understood.
Properly exercised, applied history also holds to the other great principle of historicism: that human institutions are explained by tracking their development over time. We cannot fully understand the features of the present unless we see them in motion, positioned in trajectories which link our world with that of our forebears. Without historical perspective we may fail to notice continuities which persist, even in our world of headlong change. In the case of social and cultural formations which sometimes seem to stand outside the process of change – for example the nation and the ‘traditional’ family – historical perspective reveals how different it was ‘then’ and what factors have brought about change. Perception confined to the observed present is particularly stultifying when applied to foreign societies. Contrasting their present with our own too readily produces an impression of the quaint, the bizarre or the outright savage. Historical research reveals the provenance of these stereotypes. Conversely, it also brings to light the collective memories of the society in question and shows how these condition their political culture and their relations with other societies (including our own).
So far as the health of our democratic culture is concerned, the most important feature of ‘thinking with history’ is that it resists closure. To approach topical issues historically is to ‘step outside the box’ and to entertain interpretations beyond the reach of present-bound perspectives. History certainly provides evidential weight for points of view which have currency today, but it also brings unfamiliar or forgotten angles of interpretation back into public discourse, as my extended case study of the Victorian family showed. This openness to diversity of interpretation is what should characterise an independent-minded citizenry. It induces a healthy scepticism about the claims to inevitability or omniscience which are a recurrent feature of our political culture.
These are some of the reasons why the historical profession can potentially provide an important public service. Historians have two tasks: to disseminate those of their findings which bear upon issues of the day, and to promote the widest possible grasp of the merits of ‘thinking with history’. Public history in this sense is not just an option to be pursued by a handful of publicity-seeking academics. It is a social obligation. That its record is patchy at best is due to a combination of circumstances: the founding conventions of the profession itself, the way in which applied history has been shockingly abused in the past and the pressures on academics to write exclusively for their peers. Opportunities to promote the public role of history have been missed. When, during the 1980s, governments in Britain began to demand that university history should reinvent itself as a vocational subject, historians took this to mean an emphasis on generic skills like communication and analysis, which would dilute the historical content of their teaching. What they neglected to do was to take issue with the terms of the official discourse by demonstrating the vocational nature of history itself. Historical awareness and historical perspective are ‘transferable’ skills, but this point has been lost in the debates about higher education, because few historians see their insights as transferable, and fewer still encourage their students to think in this way.
This is the missing dimension of public history. Many historians have signed up to roles in museums and other heritage institutions, and the idea of a democratic partnership between academics and amateur groups is still very much alive. But the injection of historical perspective into crucial public issues is spasmodic, and only a minority of historians see it as an important aspect of their professional work. Of course a great many themes and topics in history lack any contemporary resonance and are very unlikely to develop it in the future. But where historical research does touch on agendas of topical debate, it is overly fastidious to withhold the findings from the public on the grounds of academic propriety. The History & Policy website has been foregrounded here, not only because of its careful focus on disseminating applied work but because it could provide a model for the future. The model is not that of the public intellectual pronouncing on any and every issue of the day, but of academics sharing with the public their own scholarly expertise. The prospects for a historically minded citizenry depend on a reformed school curriculum, a reordered scale of priorities in the media, and a keener sense of the public interest among academics. The prize is a critically armed and better-informed public, providing the basis for a revitalised democratic culture.