Performing Public History

The work of public history necessarily entails a kind of masking given the “history” to which most Americans subscribe. There is no better example of enforced civic pride than a recent federal government edict directing the Interior Department to install signs outside the National Museum of American History allegedly correcting "inaccurate information presented in the Museum" and directing visitors to "locations and resources for accurate information regarding America's history." This followed a White House Domestic Policy Council report accusing the museum of failing to tell the American story "honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic." It builds on the March 2025 executive order entitled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," which seeks to remove "improper ideology" from Smithsonian properties and reinstate monuments removed for what the order calls "perpetuating a false reconstruction of American history."

This remit manifests in the work of public history, which is a balancing act between keeping potential members happy with enough self-aggrandizing mythology about their ancestors

Public history in that sense is a kind of transaction: tell me something good about my people, and I’ll give you the money to keep fishing for compliments in the deep well of the historical record.

So the question is, what if anthropology did have a series of "homes" out in the wild where we occasionally venture, decoupled for the most part from our domestic sphere of the university? If you walked into a building to do anthropology, what would you do? And are there precedents?

All of that, of course, depends on what you mean by anthropology, and there's a broad church for you. For myself, the act of anthropology is intensely historical by default. Maybe that is because the place where I work is a comparatively young polity where all written history was practically yesterday in anthropological terms. I feel the past everywhere in America. Or maybe that is because its original founding sins continue to so strongly shape our present.

And ye the point is not just to recapitulate the self-regarding university elsewhere.

If public history is self-aggrandizing, the university is self-important. Nonsense boxed up as wisdom.