The Bigger Picture

1970-2021

When the whole corpus of the Public Historian, from its earliest publications in 1978 all the way to 2021, is analyzed, several trends are immediately apparent. The spread of topics when mapped onto planes shows their interconnectedness.

What this suggests is that several of the ten generated topics, Topics 1, 2, 3, and 4 are connected, while the others are slightly set apart if not totally disconnected. The largest topic is Topic 1, whose terms accounts for 29.8% of all generated topics of the whole corpus. I would define it as “historical-political research work”, as all the topics contained within it contain references to research-based work as it relates to government work. Words like “federal”, “state”, historical”, “government”, and “study” appear among the generated topics and dominate both Topic 1 as well as the previously stated three topics nearby.

All four of those interconnected topics showcase what I think is a snapshot of the corpus writ large. As I will explore in the analysis below when the corpus is broken down decade by decade, there are distinct periods in the literature that represent a different focus. In the earlier decades of the journal’s corpus, the employment directive is represented very strongly. To this end, Topics 6 and 1 contain words that represent this most strongly, like “professional” and “California”, the latter being a clear reference to the place where the first public history graduate programs emerged. Articles early in the corpus’ publication discuss this very strongly, such as Kelley’s first ever,[1] and Grele’s[2] references to the history and potential future goals of the field.

Alongside this, however, within Topic 1 and, more strongly, within Topics 2, 3, and 4 are references to museum studies, to cultural studies, and to people and the public. This references the goal that Grele felt public history was unable to serve early on its history, in the 1980s, and which Conard references as an interest for historians who began engaging with the field later on. Public history could interact with local cultural history by both working alongside local museums, and producing academic works of history that related to marginalized people and communities. Cultural research and work was clearly important to the field, just as fulfilling on its employment directive was. To which degree these focuses mattered, and when, is not immediately evident based on the topics generated for the whole corpus, and will be examined more fully when I look at the corpus’ decade by decade.

The following figure clearly illustrates what I expect to find in the individual decade by decade corpus, and what the historiography of the field suggests as well.

By using a relative frequency model, I can search the corpus using targeted terms to highlight the two trends I identified in the historiography. Two terms that clearly reference the employment directive – “government” and “California” – are of clear relevance early in the corpus’ existence. Their relevance slowly decreases over time, particularly beginning in the 2000s, though both are still important within the field. Contrastingly, two terms that reference a potential change in focus to cultural and community oriented history – “memory” and “colonial” – are clearly not relevant early in the field’s history, but beginning in the 1990s and particularly the 2000s start rising in relevance, and memory rising very sharply in relevance after the 2000s.

Here, the relative frequency model clearly shows that in the earlier decades of the Public Historian’s publication history the employment directive was more important, while in the latter decades a change in focus became a hallmark of the field. I expect that breaking down the corpus’ decade by decade will show this just as clearly, with the earlier topic models of the decades showing little to no focus outside of the employment directive, and reflecting that shift in the 1990s and 2000s.

[1] Kelley, “Public History.”

[2] Grele, “Whose Public?”