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Public History, Civic Engagement and the

Historical Profession in Britain
JOHN TOSH
University of Roehampton

Abstract
My purpose is to test the proposition that academic historians are central – rather than
peripheral – to the practice of public history. Public history generally refers to work that is
pursued outside the academy, by the combined efforts of historians and lay people, often
pursuing a heritage agenda with a strictly local remit. The resulting enlargement in the scope
of historical enquiry is greatly to be welcomed, but it should not be treated as the sum total
of public history, still less as grounds for disparaging the historical profession. The civic
importance of academic historians arises from their ability to enhance public understanding
of national and international issues which form no part of ‘public’ history as usually
understood, because they transcend questions of locality and identity. The health of a
representative democracy depends in part on the citizen’s readiness critically to examine
issues which do not affect him or her directly but which are in the public interest. This
argument was first made by the leaders of the historical profession following the Second
Reform Act in 1867. During and after the First World War it was put into practice, not least
within the pages of History (taken over by the Historical Association in 1916). More recently
the relationship between active citizenship and critical history has been re-asserted for the
digital age by the History and Policy website.

We are not merely historians, but also and always citizens, with a respon-
sibility to bring our skills to bear upon the common interest
Tony Judt1

P ublic history has been a feature of the cultural landscape in

Britain for only a decade and a half. In 2000 the first Ruskin
conference on public history was convened, and the first academic
evaluation of the field appeared in the same year.2 This recent develop-
ment means that public history can convincingly claim the imprimatur
of novelty, and much of the work which is conducted under its banner
is manifestly new, most notably in television, community history and a
range of heritage institutions. As a result, definitions of history are

I am grateful to Lucy Delap and Caroline White for their helpful comments.
1
Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (London, 2012), p. 268.
2
Hilda Kean, Paul Martin and Sally Morgan (eds), Seeing History: Public History in Britain
(London, 2000); Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London, 2000), ch. 6.

© 2014 The Author. History © 2014 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
192 PUBLIC HISTORY

beginning to look different from what they were a generation ago.3

Much of the presumed novelty of public history rests on the way it is
moulded by the initiatives of historical practitioners outside academia,
for example museum curators, conservationists and TV producers. They
bring a fresh input, posing new questions, developing new methods, and
in some cases acting as a conduit for popular participation.
Within this buoyant scene the place of professional historians is far
from clear. In a situation where novelty is at a premium and is associ-
ated with non-academics, academic historians appear to perform no
more than a servicing role, in marked contrast to their accustomed
prestige as historical experts par excellence.4 Yet the notion that public
history is an entirely fresh departure will not survive scrutiny of its
meaning. Nor is the role of professional historians to be so lightly
dismissed. As several commentators have noted, logically ‘public
history’ denotes all the ways in which history is made available to a
non-specialist public, and these are by no means restricted to the inno-
vatory practices of recent years.5 Professional historians draw on a long
tradition of public outreach. Best known are the popular works of
history intended for leisure reading, which sometimes achieve mouth-
watering sales.6 But historians are also well placed to address the public
good more directly by applying their expertise to the understanding of
current politics and other areas of social concern. In a representative
democracy these are regarded as the business of the reflective and par-
ticipating citizen. Historians have long claimed that their discipline
provides unique insights into today’s world: there is nothing novel
about learning from the mistakes made in the last war, or about uncov-
ering forgotten philosophies of social welfare. For that reason critical
history for citizens sits uncomfortably in the innovative discourse of
public history. But given that the rationale of public history is to maxi-
mize the presence of history in the public sphere, work intended to reach
the participating and reflective citizen clearly falls under that umbrella.
I refer to work of this kind as ‘critical public history’ not in a spirit of
exclusivity (since a critical edge is found in other branches of public
history), but because in historical writing addressed to citizens critiquing
accepted truths and airing debates are of the essence. In order to deliver
this programme, historians need to be more confident that their disci-

3
J. M. Winter, ‘Public history and historical scholarship’, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996),
pp. 169–70; Jeremy de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary
Popular Culture (London, 2009); Paul Ashton and Hilda Kean (eds), People and their Pasts: Public
History Today (Basingstoke, 2009), ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–2.
4
Ann Curthoys and Paula Hamilton, ‘What makes history public?’, Public History Review, 1
(1992), pp. 9–10; Kean et al., Seeing History, pp. 13–17.
5
Jordanova, History in Practice, ch. 6; Holger Hoock, ‘Professional practices of Public History in
Britain’, The Public Historian, 32 (2010), pp. 7–24; Mary Stevens, ‘Public policy and the public
historian: the changing place of historians in public life in France and the UK’, The Public
Historian, 32 (2010), pp. 120–38.
6
This dimension is analysed in Peter J. Beck, Presenting History: Past & Present (Basingstoke,
2012).

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 JOHN TOSH 193

pline is relevant and potentially accessible, and their confidence might

be enhanced by a greater awareness of the earlier tradition of ‘citizen
scholars’.7
My purpose in this article is to demonstrate the critical and distinc-
tive role which academic historians can play within the broad agenda of
public history, by calling to mind their previous track record, and by
identifying current best practice. I first of all offer a critical perspective
on the dominant forms of public history in Britain today; I next make
the case for a democratically attuned public history by placing it in a
broader theoretical frame. I then explore its historical antecedents, not
through a continuous narrative (impractical in an article of this length),
but by reference to two critical turning points: the response of historians
to the Second Reform Act in 1867, and their contribution to public
understanding of the First World War and its aftermath. I conclude
with an assessment of the History & Policy website – the most effective
and innovative initiative in critical public history today.

II
At a time when historians have been under mounting pressure to justify
their existence, ‘public history’ succinctly expresses the notion that his-
torians can reach an expanding lay audience and that their activities
contribute to the public good. Earlier justifications of history as a
socially necessary discipline were more concerned with supply than
demand. Historians were little given to reflecting on the nature of their
audience beyond the lecture theatre. Thus E. H. Carr, the most influ-
ential proponent of ‘relevance’ in the previous generation, did not con-
sider who the readership for his chosen themes might be, or the most
effective means of reaching it.8 The contrast with today should not be
exaggerated. Peter J. Beck observes that ‘the lay audience has proved,
and remains, a low priority for most academic historians’. All the same,
his book Presenting History (2012), tracing the impact of historians on
TV, film and popular fiction, would have been inconceivable twenty
years ago.9
Yet no new subdiscipline of history has been so lacking in coherent
definition. A bewildering variety of criteria is on offer. Public history
variously appears as both entertainment and instruction; it covers both
the written word (preferably in very large sales) and the visual presen-
tation of heritage sites; it attracts public funding, but also harnesses

7
The phrase is open to different interpretations. I follow here Harvey J. Kaye, who in The Powers
of the Past (Minneapolis, 1991), p. 150, defines ‘citizen-scholars’ as those who ‘by their labours
contribute directly to public culture and debate’.
8
E. H. Carr, What Is History? (London, 1961).
9
Beck, Presenting History, p. 11.

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194 PUBLIC HISTORY

volunteers in large numbers;10 it is defined by its audience as well as its

content; it is sometimes dismissed as irredeemably populist, sometimes as
a new form of elitism.11 Above all, the term ‘public historian’ is highly
ambiguous: it is variously taken to denote an academic involved in
outreach, or a qualified historian employed in the public sector, or an
amateur enthusiast. All of these usages are legitimate and welcome
additions to the profile of history, but there is a tendency for each of them
to appropriate the term ‘public history’ for exclusive use. Thus Jeremy
Black defines public history as ‘the use of history by states and civil
society’; J. M. Winter on the other hand regards ‘collective endeavour’ as
the essence of doing public history.12 Such definitions render invisible
other approaches with equally valid claims to be public history. There
is therefore some merit in adopting a lowest-common-denominator
definition. In essence public history refers to knowledge about the past
which is made freely available on the widest possible terms. Who places
it in the public sphere is secondary: whether it is the amateur enthusiast,
the museum curator, or the professional historian. As Mary Stevens has
put it, ‘History. . . . . . becomes “public” when shaped for an audience to
meet the demands of the present, irrespective of the professional or social
status of either the shapers or the audience.’13 Broad though this
definition is, it does set certain limits. History intended primarily for
academic use is obviously excluded; so too is individual research pursued
for personal reasons (as in family history).14
Public history has rightly been described as ‘a huge, perhaps unman-
ageable phenomenon’.15 But that makes the drawing of distinctions
within the field all the more necessary. Two facets of public history
carry particular weight in Britain today. In the first place, public history
is identified with the heritage sector: museums, historic sites and com-
memoration. Academic historians are active in an advisory capacity,
facilitated by the increasing proportion of custodians and curators who
are themselves trained in the discipline. In fact the principal area of
tension lies not with the staff of these institutions, but with the various
communities who demand a say in the selection, interpretation and
presentation of historical material. The management of many museums
is now significantly affected by competing extramural demands for

10
This tension is well analysed in Madge Dresser, ‘Politics, populism and professionalism: reflec-
tions on the role of the academic historian in the production of public history’, The Public
Historian, 32 (2010), pp. 39–63.
11
The following convey something of the varied approach to defining the field: Winter, ‘Public
history and historical scholarship’; Ashton and Kean, People and their Pasts, pp. 8–13; Beck,
Presenting History; Jill Liddington, ‘What is public history?’, Oral History, 30 (2002), pp. 83–93;
Justin Champion, ‘What are historians for?’, Historical Research, 81 (2008), pp. 167–88.
12
Winter, ‘Public history and historical scholarship’, pp. 169–70.
13
Stevens, ‘Public policy and the public historian,’ p. 122.
14
This exclusion is not universally accepted, but here I follow Liddington, ‘What is public
history?’.
15
Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Public history’, History Today, 50 (2000), pp. 20–1.

© 2014 The Author. History © 2014 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
 JOHN TOSH 195
16
acquisition and display along ‘community’ lines. One consequence of
the emphasis on display throughout the heritage sector is that, whereas
earlier publically minded historians would have looked no further than
the need to be read widely, there is now a keen understanding that the
public experiences history visually – directly through the material
remains of the past, and indirectly through TV.
Second, for many practitioners ‘public history’ means history that is
not only consumed by ordinary people but is also researched and dis-
seminated by them. Through these means the history of many local
communities and cultural groups has been placed on record. This was
the approach to public history endorsed by the Ruskin conference in
2000: local, quotidian and participatory. In fact the conference was
drawing on an older tradition, usually known as ‘people’s history’ or
‘history from below’, and closely associated with History Workshop in
its early years. Amateurs not only set the agenda but engage in the
production of historical knowledge through their own research and
writing. Theirs is a ‘participatory historical culture’.17 Topics of enquiry
range from the recovery of everyday experience to the documenting of
identity and resistance in the case of oppressed minorities. Academics –
typically left-wing historians with a commitment to popular empower-
ment – offer guidance and in some cases arrange for publication.18 The
sense of new departure is greatest with respect to oral history, first
developed in the 1960s and since then strongly associated with notions
of reclaiming the past. ‘Shared authority’ – which has come to be the
accepted way of describing the basis of collaboration between inter-
viewer and witness – captures the spirit in which professional historians
work with amateurs and activists at the local level.19 In community
history the shift in the balance of authority from historian to a lay
constituency is particularly evident, sometimes leading to the marginal-
ization of the academics. Their expertise may be grudgingly accepted, or
disparaged as elitism.20 That shift of authority is made explicit in some
definitions of public history. Thus Anne Curthoys and Paula Hamilton
define it as ‘those forms of historical understanding which are produced
outside the academy’.21 Bronwen Dalley and Jock Phillips see public
history as ‘historical work undertaken according to the research priori-
ties, agendas or funding capacities of another party rather than being

16
Sheila Watson (ed.), Museums and their Communities (London, 2007); Elizabeth Crooke, ‘An
exploration of the connections among museums, community and heritage’, in Brian Graham and
Peter Howard (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (Aldershot, 2008),
pp. 415–24.
17
Ashton and Kean, People and their Pasts, p. 2.
18
Dresser, ‘Politics, populism and professionalism’.
19
Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History
(New York, 1990).
20
Dresser, ‘Politics, populism and professionalism’.
21
Curthoys and Hamilton, ‘What makes history public?’, p. 9.

© 2014 The Author. History © 2014 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
196 PUBLIC HISTORY

self-directed by the historian’.22 That emphasis is reflected by funding

agencies in Britain which set a premium on ordinary people ‘taking part’
in their heritage through open-door museums, local history projects and
the like.
Public history of this kind is manifestly and professedly ‘democratic’ in
that new forms of open-access enquiry have been established, and many
features of ‘history from below’ have been brought to light. The historical
landscape would be much the poorer without these innovations. But
what the dominant discourse of public history too readily assumes is
that practical commitment to democratic empowerment is confined to
community-based projects in which citizens participate. From this
perspective academic research appears to be removed from the real
world, its practitioners the last people to engage with the needs of
citizens. Yet this is to make an unfounded dismissal of the practical
bearing of academic knowledge. Well-informed citizens need not only
historical knowledge of their own communities, but historically informed
insight into major public issues, affecting society as a whole. It is here
that the work of academics comes into its own, making available rele-
vant understandings which depend very largely on the expertise of the
professional. In short, historians have the potential to make a major
contribution to the knowledge resources of citizens. For that objective to
be realized there needs to be a conviction of its legitimacy and a
demonstration of its practicality.

III
The idea that history exists for the enlightenment of the citizen has a
distinguished liberal provenance. From John Stuart Mill to Jürgen
Habermas liberal thought about citizenship focused on the quality of
public discourse and the resources of knowledge on which it depends.23
More recently these issues have been brought into sharper relief by
political theorists under the banner of ‘deliberative democracy’.24 This
has been in part a reaction against a much narrower focus on the formal
counting of heads in elections to representative bodies. It is also an
attempt to move beyond the cynical view of politics as no more than the

22
Bronwen Dalley and Jock Phillips (eds), Going Public: The Changing Face of New Zealand
History (Auckland, 2001), p. 9.
23
Nadia Urbinati, Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government
(Chicago, 2002), p. 54; Alex Zakaras, ‘John Stuart Mill, individuality and participatory democ-
racy’, in N. Urbinati and A. Zakaras (eds), J. S. Mill’s Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassess-
ment (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 200–20; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA, 1989); Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere
(Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 17–22.
24
Amy Gutmann and Denis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, 2004); Joshua
Cohen, ‘Deliberative democracy’, in Shawn W. Rosenberg (ed.), Deliberation, Participation and
Democracy: Can the People Govern? (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 219–36; Paul Ginsborg, The Politics
of Everyday Life: Making Choices, Changing Lives (London, 2005), pp. 191–5.

© 2014 The Author. History © 2014 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
 JOHN TOSH 197

play of self-promoting interest groups. ‘Deliberative democracy’ means

the performance of active citizenship in representative democracies. The
citizen is seen as a rational being: speaking in public, listening to con-
trary views, and being prepared to revise his or her opinions. As David
Miller has put it, ‘deliberative democracy relies upon a person’s capacity
to be swayed by rational arguments and to lay aside particular interests
and opinions in deference to . . . the common interest of the collectiv-
ity’.25 In a perfect world deliberative democracy would take the form of
collective self-rule, in which government would be answerable to the
rational and critical views of its citizens. This was what Mill had in mind
in theorizing the nature of representative government.26 It also corre-
sponds to the somewhat idealized picture of early modern society
depicted by Habermas in his analysis of the bourgeois , male-dominated
public sphere. The implication of Habermas’s time frame is that the
conditions of deliberative democracy no longer exist, because an inflated
electorate and a commercially based mass media have destroyed the
conditions in which the public sphere flourished in the eighteenth
century. According to Habermas, citizens no longer participate; instead
they follow the logic of entitlement implicit in the welfare state by
demanding services, frequenting ‘the rooms and anterooms of bureau-
cracies’.27
Yet to dismiss altogether the scope for rational debate in a society
like contemporary Britain is overly pessimistic. The elevated public
sphere described by Habermas may no longer exist, but there are still
public conversations and conflicting polemics. This is easier to recognize
within the intellectual tradition of deliberative democracy. Jane
Mansbridge, for example, proposes ‘democratic deliberation’ as a less
rigorous form of ‘deliberative democracy’, in order to emphasize the
continuing importance of debate in societies where citizens exercise only
limited political power, but where they still have access to thoughtful
insights into matters of topical concern. Both broadcasting and the
press give space to such material, even though they may be driven by
less public-spirited priorities. Deliberating citizens may be a minority of
the body politic, but it is not unknown for them to exercise dispropor-
tionate influence in defining ‘public opinion’.28
In the context of public history, deliberative democracy is critical for
two reasons. First, it points up the need for citizens to have access to
relevant information which goes far beyond what is available through
their community affiliations or their engagement with ‘heritage’.
Responsible citizenship includes forming a judgement on issues that do

25
David Miller, ‘Deliberative democracy and social choice’, in James S. Fishkin and Peter Laslett
(eds), Debating Deliberative Democracy (Oxford, 2003), pp. 183–4.
26
Zakaras, ‘John Stuart Mill’.
27
Habermas, Structural Transformation, pp. 202–3, 211.
28
Jane Mansbridge, ‘ “Deliberative democracy” or “democratic deliberation” ’, in Rosenberg
(ed.), Deliberation, Participation and Democracy, pp. 251–71.

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198 PUBLIC HISTORY

not bear directly on the individual’s immediate interests: for example

the underlying drift of welfare policy, rather than the fate of a local
hospital; or international relations, as distinct from the presence of
neighbours from foreign countries. This is by no means the only con-
tribution that historical knowledge can make to citizenship. That con-
tribution is most often construed as an agreed national narrative
promoting social cohesion – of the kind which has most often prevailed
in the school curriculum.29 History can also yield a surer sense of the
civil liberties and human rights transmitted from the past.30 But provid-
ing critical perspectives on a broad range of current policy concerns is
something for which historians are particularly well qualified.
Second, deliberative democracy emphasizes debate, on the grounds
that the best solutions emerge not from administrative fiat but from the
play of conflicting opinions expressed by citizens. Here too historians
have something distinctive to offer. The lack of resolution in so many
historical controversies is sometimes regarded as a drawback to staking
a claim to social relevance. But history does not yield a tool-kit of
prescriptions. Its true value lies in supplying a range of possible answers
which not only go beyond what is currently under discussion but also
serve as a critique of the received wisdom. The proper role of the
historian in this situation is not to claim absolute authority, but to
promote the discipline as a resource for debate. The public value of
history lies in the depth and sophistication with which it can enhance
divergent prescriptions. It is easy to dismiss such an aspiration on the
grounds that the broad mass of citizens will probably never draw –
however indirectly – on historical scholarship in order to refine their
political views. But a zero-sum approach is not helpful. Even a modest
gain in historical literacy amounts to a net addition to the intellectual
resources of democracy.

IV
The decisive period in the emergence of a critical public history in
Britain was between the mid-1860s and the late 1930s. It is no accident
that this period coincided exactly with the progressive enlargement of
the franchise between 1867 and 1928, which posed the question of what
kind of historical enlightenment should be imparted to the new voters,
or at least their representatives. Notwithstanding the contrary tenden-
cies towards insular professionalism, there has since the mid-nineteenth
century been recurrent debate among historians about their obligations
to the broad mass of citizens. In 1867 and 1869 the two most senior

29
David Cannadine, Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon, The Right Kind of History: Teaching the
Past in Twentieth-Century England (London, 2011).
30
See for example Edward Vallance, A Radical History of Britain: The Men and Women Who
Fought for Our Freedoms (London, 2009).

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 JOHN TOSH 199

historians in the country delivered their inaugural lectures: William

Stubbs at Oxford and J. R. Seeley at Cambridge. Their scholarly pri-
orities could not have been more different, but both of them were very
conscious of displaying their wares in a new political climate, brought
about by the passing of the Second Reform Act of 1867. The near-
doubling of the electorate to 2.5 million, mainly by including the
‘respectable’ working class, raised questions about both the intellectual
capacity of the new voters and the training of the governing class.
At Cambridge Seeley introduced a novel standard of relevance to
historical study. Its subject matter, he declared, should be redesigned to
yield political lessons. The claims of periods and topics should be judged
strictly according to their practical utility. ‘I show you the reigns of
George II and George III, not as a mere by-gone period, . . . but as
a storehouse of materials by which we are to solve the greatest and
most urgent of political problems’.31 Seeley conceived of contemporary
history not only chronologically as the recent past, but thematically as
a body of subject matter selected according to its purchase on the
present. That might take the enquirer well beyond the reach of the
contemporary as commonly understood: for Seeley the origins of
‘Greater Britain’ under Elizabeth I were contemporary history. But he
had no qualms about rejecting the Rankean ideal of history for its own
sake, and he thought the conventional emphasis on the Middle Ages
was misdirected. Seeley stood for a ‘present history’, not ‘a past
history’.32 In this he anticipated the academic champions of contempo-
rary history a hundred years later.33
Although Seeley cared passionately about the university curriculum,
his prescriptions were intended to be national in scope. He maintained
that history was the best training for an informed electorate. ‘Without at
least a little knowledge of history no man can take a rational interest in
politics, and no man can form a rational judgment about them without a
good deal’. In a free country, said Seeley, some instruction is needed to
ensure that citizens ‘may follow with some intelligence the march of
contemporary history’.34 British insularity being a major obstacle to such
understanding, Seeley recommended to the public the history of other
states and of Britain’s relations with them.35 Yet as a democratic educator
Seeley’s credentials were compromised by his instinctive elitism. He
aligned himself with the established tradition of using history to teach the
governing class, as when he declared, in his most famous aphorism, that
history was ‘the school of statesmanship’.36 For him popular historical
knowledge was not an arena of democratic discourse. As Reba Soffer has

31
J. R. Seeley, Introduction to Political Science (London, 1896), p. 170.
32
J. R. Seeley, Lectures and Essays (London, 1870), pp. 316–17.
33
Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World (Oxford, 1955); Gordon Connell-Smith and
Howell A. Lloyd, The Relevance of History (London, 1972).
34
Seeley, Lectures, pp. 296–8.
35
Deborah Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History (Cambridge, 1980), p. 103.
36
Seeley, Lectures, p. 296.

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200 PUBLIC HISTORY

pointed out, ‘Seeley had no intention of allowing ordinary people to

come to their own conclusions about appropriate public conduct.’ The
historian’s role was to offer the public solutions which erased individual
or partisan views.37 The civic value of history lay in its capacity to achieve
a single national consciousness which would induce people to support the
existing political system. This was a programme for social cohesion
rather than popular empowerment.38
At first glance Seeley’s Oxford contemporary, William Stubbs,
sounds even less promising as champion of critical public history: he
was a Tory, a pillar of the established church, and a historian whose
austere reputation was based on medieval textual scholarship. In his
inaugural lecture in 1867 he was expected to uphold the virtues of
history for its own sake, and he did so, calling for a ‘republic of
workers’ in historical research. But Stubbs also made a serious argu-
ment about the civic utility of history. He told his audience to value
history not for its vivid incidents or its compelling narrative, but
because it taught ‘judgment’. By this he meant the ability to provide
historical perspective on passing events, and to recognize their true
complexity.39 Stubbs did not regard this principle as grounds for teach-
ing contemporary history. Quite the reverse: in his view, ‘judgment’ was
best acquired by studying periods of history which no longer aroused
controversy (in his view, the Reformation and the Great Rebellion still
did).40
Ten years later, Stubbs addressed the needs of the new electorate.
Already in 1867 he had declared that his purpose was to train ‘citizens
. . . to be fitted not for criticism or for authority in matters of memory,
but for action’.41 But by ‘citizens’ he seems at this stage to have had in
mind only the future leaders in church and state who were studying
history at university. In 1877 he redeployed the concept of citizenship
much more inclusively. Stubbs advocated the serious study of history in
the recently expanded elementary school system. If this could be
achieved, it would furnish ‘the next generation of Englishmen with the
means of exercising conscientiously, honestly and judicially, the great
political power which is now in their hands’.42 Stubbs was even prepared
to compromise on sound principles of learning. ‘There are many things
which a mere acquaintance with the facts of history, however that
acquaintance may have been gained, enables a man to do better than he
would do them without it.’ This was knowledge ‘for ordinary practical
purposes’. It would enable the citizen ‘to read his newspaper’, and ‘to

37
Reba Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite,
1870–1930 (Stanford, 1994), p. 94.
38
Wormell, Sir John Seeley, pp. 51–2, 154.
39
William Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History (Oxford,
1887), pp. 21, 84; J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent (Cambridge, 1981), p. 132.
40
Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures, pp. 53–4.
41
Ibid., p. 21.
42
Ibid., p. 113.

© 2014 The Author. History © 2014 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
 JOHN TOSH 201
43
give an honest, really intelligent vote’. The ‘judgment’ that Stubbs
attributed to instruction in history was an individual capacity which
made too little allowance for the distorting effects of political propa-
ganda, but it at least raised the possibility of varied and sometimes
competing conclusions about current affairs. Unlike Seeley, Stubbs
intended citizens to make up their own minds.
To a limited degree the Second Reform Act created the conditions for
a deliberative democracy. Gladstonian Liberalism placed a premium on
the active citizen and forged new means of communication to reach him.
There was much comment at the time on the apparent vigour of public
debate, and not only at election time. As The Times put it in 1873, ‘We
have become a nation of public speakers . . . We are now more than ever
a debating, that is a Parliamentary people.’44 Yet the contribution of
historians to this heightened civic culture was minimal. This generation
of historians was more concerned to consolidate their newly acquired
status as an academic profession than to forge links with the wider
public. At Oxford and Cambridge, where the majority of academic
historians were employed, moral training for the future governing elite
continued to be the main priority.45 Some leaders of the profession like
J. B. Bury and G. M. Trevelyan echoed the prescriptions of Stubbs and
Seeley, but they did little to implement them.46 Economic history began
to be written in the 1880s with a strong sense of relevance to current
debates, but without attempting to address a lay audience. When the
English Historical Review was founded in 1886 as the first professional
journal, the editors declared that they would not hesitate to let the light
of history be cast on practical issues; but there was scant evidence of this
in the pages of the Review.47 Between 1880 and 1914 academic historians
were intent on detaching their subject from the concerns of the present.

V
The turning point in making a reality of a critical public history for
citizens was the First World War. This was not only because the war
gave a big impetus to the study of international relations, but because
history’s explanatory claims became much more evident to lay people:
what had caused the war? Was Britain’s entry into the war justified?

43
Ibid., pp. 83–4, 123, 130.
44
The Times, 23 Oct. 1873, quoted in Eugenio Biagini, ‘Liberalism and direct democracy: John
Stuart Mill and the model of ancient Athens’, in E. F. Biagini (ed.), Citizenship and Community:
Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles, 1865–1931 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 41;
H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries (14 vols; Oxford, 1968–94), IX, p. lxix.
45
Reba Soffer, ‘The modern university and national values, 1850–1930’, Historical Research, 60
(1987), pp. 166–87.
46
J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians (New York, 1909), p. 249; G. M. Trevelyan, ‘The latest
view of history’, Independent Review, 1 (1903), p. 404.
47
Editorial, English Historical Review, 1 (1886), quoted in Stefan Collini, Public Moralists
(Oxford, 1991), p. 220.

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202 PUBLIC HISTORY

Was Germany to blame? Were there precedents for the attempt to make
a permanent peace? Leading historians ventured out of the lecture hall
to address a lay audience. This was reflected in the weekly and monthly
press, the letter columns of the dailies, and the adult education move-
ment, which flourished from the eve of the First World War and
throughout the inter-war period. If it was not quite the first time that
university historians had tried to disseminate their expertise on foreign
affairs,48 the outbreak of the war was the first time they were noticed.
The moment was scarcely propitious for a dispassionate appraisal of
German war aims or of German culture. Why We Are at War, a pam-
phlet rushed out in 1914 by six Oxford historians, echoed popular
Germanophobia.49 Other historians fed the patriotic mood of the
moment, both in print and in public lectures.50
After the initial patriotic frenzy more temperate and discriminating
applications of history took the field. The historian who contributed
most to the profile of public history during the First World War was A.
F. Pollard. The judgement may seem surprising: Pollard was a Tudor
historian, now best known for founding the Institute of Historical
Research, which, during Pollard’s time at least, was little concerned with
the wider public. But during the First World War Pollard was guided by
other priorities, which were manifest in his role in acquiring and editing
History as the organ of the Historical Association in 1916. In his first
editorial Pollard made the most immediate case for a journal of this
kind: ‘this war is creating problems which can only be solved in the light
of history.’ But the argument had a wider application:
We may even seek to bring the light of history to bear on the study of
politics, and to supply in some measure that notable void in British
intellectual equipment, the absence of any review which systematically
endeavours to link the past with the present and to test modern experi-
ment by historic experience.51
This clarion call has been much quoted, along with other high-sounding
appeals by historians. Much less notice has been taken of the ways in
which Pollard sought to make it a reality during the war itself.52 His first
intervention, ‘The war: its history and moral’, published in October
1914, was not much more than a national morale booster.53 But there-
after Pollard took a much less propagandist approach. He gave weekly

48
As maintained by Soffer, Discipline and Power, p. 46. In fact R. W. Seton-Watson had been
disseminating his historical knowledge of central and eastern Europe since 1907. C. Seton-Watson
and H. Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe: R. W. Seton-Watson and the Lost Years of
Austro-Hungary (London, 1981), p. 434.
49
Ernest Barker et al., Why We Are at War (Oxford, 1914).
50
Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics 1914–1918 (Edinburgh,
1988), pp. 58–73.
51
A. F. Pollard, editorial, History, 1 (1916–17), pp. 2–3 (emphasis added).
52
No mention is made of Pollard’s wartime work in Patrick Collinson’s otherwise appreciative
entry in the ODNB, 44 (2004), pp. 746–8.
53
A. F. Pollard, The War: Its History and Morals (London, 1915).

© 2014 The Author. History © 2014 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
 JOHN TOSH 203
54
public lectures at University College London, and these formed the
substance of a flow of articles in the weekly and monthly press, placing
key issues of the war in historical perspective: German war aims, the
freedom of the seas, the Russian Revolution and other current issues, all
of them brought together in his book The Commonwealth at War,
published in 1917. The war made Pollard one of the best-known histo-
rians in Britain.
In 1918 Pollard was appointed by the Foreign Office to a preparatory
committee on the League of Nations, tasked with exploring its historical
antecedents. What began as a confidential briefing became an item of
public history when Pollard published the gist of his findings in The
League of Nations: A Historical Argument (1918). After outlining the
failure of all historical precedents to outlaw war, Pollard pointed out
that the will to do so was now much greater because post-war condi-
tions were so much more devastating than anything previously known.
He also counselled building on past experiments rather than establishing
institutions de novo. That meant abandoning the idea of international
governance. The goal must be a treaty between nations to ban war and
to resist any breach by force: security rather than justice should be the
guiding principle.55 This was indeed testing ‘modern experiment by his-
torical experience’. Pollard’s was not the only attempt to draw on his-
torical precedent as a means of deepening popular understanding of the
war. In the run-up to the Paris peace conference, Charles Webster
published an account of the Congress of Vienna – the last time when the
map of Europe had been redrawn by a full gathering of the powers; it
was commissioned by the Foreign Office, but intended for the reading
public as well as diplomats, and it was reprinted several times during the
inter-war period.56 But Pollard the non-specialist was unusual in writing
for the public on such a range of pressing issues.
After the war Pollard no longer made topical interventions of this
kind, but his belief in public history was undimmed. The case which
Seeley and Stubbs had made for the place of history in citizenship had
grown in strength. Now that ordinary people enjoyed a measure of
political power, Pollard had declared in 1911, their need of historical
enlightenment was all the greater, since otherwise they would be at the
mercy of the sensationalist press.57 He still held to this view in 1932.58
Editing History (from 1916 to 1922) was Pollard’s way of prosecuting
this programme. The acquisition of the title by the Historical Associa-
tion marked a significant enlargement of its project. Pollard himself had
been one of the founders of the association in 1906, but at that point it

54
A. F. Pollard, draft public lectures, University of London Senate House Library, Pollard MS
860/19/3.
55
A. F. Pollard, undated draft report for Phillimore Committee, Pollard MS 860/16/1; A. F.
Pollard, The League of Nations: A Historical Argument (Oxford, 1918), pp. 49–51, 66.
56
C. K. Webster, The Congress of Vienna (London, 1919; repr. 1934, 1937, 1945 and 1963).
57
A. F. Pollard, On the Educational Value of the Study of History (London, 1911), pp. 7, 10.
58
A. F. Pollard, Factors in Modern History, 2nd edn (New York, 1932), p. 8.

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204 PUBLIC HISTORY

was mainly conceived as a support for history teachers in schools.59

Now its role was expanded to address the wider constituency of those
interested in history. History maintained the focus on history teaching
and published specialist articles, but it also sought to apply historical
reasoning to topical issues of the day. The journal made a notable
contribution to the public understanding of international and imperial
affairs: Franco-German relations, the background to the American
entry into the war, the project of an imperial parliament, and so on.60
History also featured programmatic statements such as R. W. Seton-
Watson’s inaugural lecture on contemporary history and Charles Grant
Robertson’s lecture on the value of history in wartime.61 The big rise in
membership of the Historical Association during the 1920s reflected this
topical emphasis.62
The inter-war period is sometimes dismissed as one in which histori-
ans refrained from engaging with topical issues – as if the conservative
philosopher Michael Oakeshott spoke for the entire profession when he
excoriated a ‘practical’ approach to the past.63 This picture is certainly
exaggerated. The public could draw on a very animated debate among
historians about German ‘war guilt’ and appeasement. Students who
enrolled in the tutorial classes offered by the WEA showed a preference
for economics and economic history, taught by R. H. Tawney and
others with a due regard for the past in the present.64 The picture of
cautious retreat applies rather better to the period after 1945, when too
little historical appraisal was made of the Cold War, and when historical
reassessment of the British empire and its postcolonial legacies was slow
in coming. The magazine History Today appeared to offer something
more topical. Introducing the first issue in 1951, the editors asserted that
historians were better qualified than most to make sense of the massive
changes through which contemporaries were living. Yet for the most
part the magazine stuck to safe topics that appealed to a non-political
readership. With one or two notable exceptions, the historical profes-
sion during the 1950s did not cultivate the notion that its findings might
speak to citizens about their current concerns.65

59
Keith Robbins, ‘History, the Historical Association and the “national past” ’, History, 66
(1981), pp. 413–25.
60
A. F. Pollard, ‘The growth of an imperial Parliament’, ante 1 (1916–17), pp. 129–46; Andrew C.
McLoughlin, ‘America’s entry into the war: an historical statement’, ante 3 (1918–19), pp. 65–81;
E. Halevy, ‘Franco-German relations since 1870’, ante 9 (1924–5), pp. 18–29.
61
Charles Grant Robertson, ‘The value of historical studies in time of war’, ante 24 (1940), pp.
289–94.
62
Charles Webster, jubilee address, in Historical Association, The Jubilee Addresses (London,
1956), pp. 19–20.
63
Peter Mandler, History and National Life (London, 2002), pp. 50–1; Michael Oakeshott, Expe-
rience and its Modes (Cambridge, 1933), and Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London,
1962).
64
J. M. Winter, History and Society (London, 1978), p. 4; Ross Terrill, R. H. Tawney and his
Times (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 181–2. See now Lawrence Goldman, R. H. Tawney (London, 2013).
65
A notable exception was Barraclough, History in a Changing World.

© 2014 The Author. History © 2014 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
 JOHN TOSH 205

VI
Nor was the attitude of the profession towards a critical public history
merely one of indifference; there was outright hostility. Writing in 1964,
V. H. Galbraith did not mince his words: ‘recent experiments abroad
have shown . . . that the study of history can be given a practical bias, but
only at the cost of making it frankly propagandist . . . You cannot, in fact,
make history pay a dividend.66 G. R. Elton was blunter still. Those
historians who sought to address the ‘alleged demands’ of contemporary
society would, he maintained in 1977, lead history ‘straight to destruction
and damnation’.67 It is hard to tell how popular such extreme views were
in the profession. But historians did tend to draw back from the idea that
history might have more direct and immediate application. In his
influential appraisal of the state of British history, published in 1987,
David Cannadine endorsed the claim of historians to be ‘public teachers’;
but having noted with concern the collapse of the professional consensus
about what the content of British history should be, he had little to
say about how historians could fulfil their public role.68 These doubts
perhaps explain the relative failure of one of the more enterprising public
history ventures in the 1980s. Faber commissioned a series of Historical
Handbooks with the intention of providing appropriate historical
orientation for key areas of policy-making, ranging from criminal justice
to housing and philanthropy. According to Avner Offer – co-editor of the
series with F. M. L. Thompson – the contributors contented themselves
with supplying historical background rather than illuminating the
choices which were open to policy-makers in the present. The series was
discontinued after only a handful of titles.69 Roy Porter was not tilting at
straw men when he insisted that ‘historians must not pen themselves up
in ivory towers, spinning sophisticated philosophical denials of the
continuities between past and present, and insisting that history teaches
nothing (except that it teaches nothing).’70
Today opposition to a topical public history has not disappeared. For
example, Peter Mandler believes that history must be defended ‘from
the politicians, from the immediate demands of the market-place, from
the day-to-day dictates of journalism and the mass media’.71 But there is

66
V. H. Galbraith, An Introduction to the Study of History (London, 1964), p. 59.
67
G. R. Elton, ‘The historian’s social function’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 27
(1977), p. 210.
68
David Cannadine, ‘British history: past, present – and future?’, Past & Present, 116 (1987), pp.
169–91. However Cannadine’s more recent advocacy of a Chief Government Historian (with a
historian attached to every department) suggests that his position has shifted.
69
Avner Offer, personal communication. For his hopes for the series, see ‘Using the past in
Britain: retrospect and prospect’, The Public Historian, 6 (1984), pp. 17–36. The series included
volumes by W. D. Rubinstein, James Sharpe, Martin Daunton and Frank Prochaska.
70
Roy Porter, in Juliet Gardiner (ed.), The History Debate (London, 1990), pp. 13–21, at p. 19.
71
Peter Mandler, ‘The responsibility of the historian’, in H. Jones, K. Ostberg and N. Randeraad
(eds), Contemporary History on Trial: Europe since 1989 and the Role of the Expert Historian
(Manchester, 2007), pp. 12–26, at p. 21.

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206 PUBLIC HISTORY

probably less support for this point of view than there was thirty years
ago. Public history has experienced something of a revival in recent
years – not merely as a pious aspiration (though, as before, there have
been plenty of these) but as a practical project. Some historians have
been provoked by the tendency in British politics to ignore all prec-
edents and past trajectories. This was particularly true of Tony Blair,
who cast a veil over the history of his own party and the policies that he
was dismantling. Subsequent governments have proved little better. The
likely costs of this myopia suggested that it was timely to stage a
counterattack.72 The wider intellectual scene was also favourable. By the
beginning of the twenty-first century the tide of postmodernism was on
the wane and with it the relativist approach to historical knowledge.
Demonstrating the relevance of history depends on reasonably robust
truth claims, which historians now felt more confident about advancing.
Lastly, the idea of applied history might be in bad odour with some
influential historians, but it was consistent with the direction of research
policy in the government. Ministers were increasingly insisting that the
only research worth funding was research that had application and
‘impact’. Writing for the non-academic press had become eligible for
rewards in esteem and funding.
The evidence for this revival is to be found in a range of media.
Traditionally the newspapers held pride of place. Historians have long
resorted to letters to the press. They are all the more effective when
signed by a collective. Shortly before the general election of 2010 The
Guardian published a letter from twenty historians, headed by Martin
Daunton, Professor of Economic History at Cambridge. Their main
point was that the alarm currently expressed about the extent of the
public debt was greatly exaggerated: a large public debt had been the
norm in Britain since the late eighteenth century, usually at a higher
level than today. Economic growth had enabled Britain to escape from
earlier debt burdens, and it could do so again provided a policy of
spending cuts was not pursued.73 Here was a succinct statement which
offered a sorely needed sense of proportion on a key political issue. It
is also now commonplace to see historians writing as regular columnists
in the newspapers: John Keegan, Linda Colley and the late Eric
Hobsbawm are recent examples.
Second, historians like other academics, feature in broadcasting. In
fact they do so more often than most other disciplines.74 But the bearing
on public history concerns is variable, to say the least. Television carries
a great deal of historical material – far more than twenty years ago.
Much of it is treated as entertainment, or it portrays periods so remote

72
The founding editors of History & Policy were particularly concerned about New Labour’s
indifference to the lessons of the past. Alastair J. Reid, personal communication.
73
The Guardian, 3 March 2010.
74
David Cannadine (ed.), History and the Media (Basingstoke, 2004); de Groot, Consuming
History.

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 JOHN TOSH 207

in time that no topical relevance can be expected. More recent history is

still dominated by the Second World War as a self-contained episode,
unrelated to subsequent developments. BBC2 and Channel 4 occasion-
ally produce in-depth historical enquiries on particular crises, but this
approach is almost wholly absent from where it would have most effect
– the regular news bulletins. Here there is a serious disconnect between
‘news’ and ‘history’. News reporting seldom draws on historical per-
spective, even though this might make the news more intelligible. This is
particularly the case with foreign news: few reporters arrive in the field
with any historical knowledge, and additional historical context is not
an editorial priority.75 Radio, on the other hand, presents a more posi-
tive picture. Programmes like The Long View (presented by Jonathan
Freedland) and The Things We Forgot to Remember (presented by
Michael Portillo) are based explicitly on the notion that our world is
constituted of past events and developments which should inform our
understanding. That is an idea which can much more easily be conveyed
in a thirty-minute radio programme than in a representation on TV.
The Reith Lectures provide perhaps the best window for historically
informed analysis since the person appointed is expected to explore a
topical issue. The roll-call of historians has featured Geoffrey Hosking
on the Soviet Union (1988), John Keegan on the changing nature of
warfare (1998), Jonathan Spence on China (2008), and Niall Ferguson
on the rule of law and civil society in relation to globalization (2012).

VII
Where both broadcasting and the press are missing important opportu-
nities is in seeking out expert historical comment on topical issues as
they arise. The internet is a really significant advance here because it
provides the means of publishing historical commentaries on issues as
they arise, instead of months or years later when topicality has receded.
Herein lies the significance of the History & Policy website. Founded in
2002 by a group of Cambridge and London historians, it aims to
provide a medium through which historians can communicate the policy
implications of their research. Co-founder Simon Szreter calls it ‘a new
way of using the past to think about the present, opening up policy
possibilities which may have previously been unthinkable or simply
invisible’.76 History & Policy is not shy in seeking a voice in the corri-
dors of power: it has, for example, arranged policy seminars with gov-
ernment officials. But the core of its activity is the policy paper posted
on the website, intended for the public and for journalists writing in the

75
Kate Adie, talk on historical perspective in the media, Institute of Historical Research, 18 Dec.
2002; John Simpson, personal communication, 3 Nov. 2005; Greg Philo and Mike Berry, Bad News
from Israel (London, 2004).
76
Simon Szreter, ‘History and public policy’, in Jonathan Bate (ed.), The Public Value of the
Humanities (London, 2011), pp. 220–1.

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208 PUBLIC HISTORY

mainstream media. A standard format of 4,000 words, including an

executive summary but no footnotes, means that articles can be quickly
posted and quickly read. In the early days contributors were usually
prompted by the editors to write; today most of the contributions are
unsolicited, which is a significant indicator of the extent to which public
history has become an accepted academic activity. Each new article is
announced in email and social media bulletins and circulated to the
media and interested parties in government and think tanks. The article
takes its place on an internet site which includes all previous articles,
classified by subject matter as well as author. After twelve years the tally
of 150 articles means that the site offers impressively comprehensive
coverage of economic and financial policy, the constitution, the
National Health Service and pensions, to name only the most promi-
nent fields. With a base at King’s College London, and sufficient
funding to employ an academic historian and two administrative staff,
History & Policy has become an established part of public history
provision in the UK.77 Given its almost total reliance on the internet, it
is easy to treat History & Policy as an entirely new venture, and the
founders are certainly to be commended for seizing on the opportunity
which the internet presented. But in intention and content the website
stands in a longer tradition of disseminating the policy lessons that can
be derived from the application of historical perspective. The difference
is that it is now being done on a much more comprehensive scale, and
with a much more attentive eye to the requirements of the lay reader.78
History & Policy brings historical perspective to bear on current
issues in two ways. It brings to light unknown or underestimated alter-
natives to the received wisdom of the day, thereby enlarging awareness
of policy options; and it demonstrates the fundamental continuities
which are so often obscured by the ‘rhetoric of newness’ favoured by
politicians.79 Lorie Charlesworth’s 2010 policy paper on the Old Poor
Law is an instance of the first.80 Today welfare is conceived as a gift of
the state. It is highly bureaucratized and conditional on the discretion of
the administering officials. Yet this version of welfare is at odds with a
much older tradition of entitlement which has been obscured, though
never formally abrogated. Charlesworth shows how before the passing
of the New Poor Law in 1834 the English poor possessed an effective
right to be relieved. Proven ‘settlement’ in the parish entitled one to be
relieved if in need, and this right was extended to foreigners also.
Payment of the poor rate and its administration by Overseers of the

77
History & Policy has also spawned a comparable network under the same name in Australia:
<http://www.aph.org.au>.
78
For a parallel exploration of the linkage between history and policy, see Pamela Cox, ‘The
future uses of history’, History Workshop Journal, 75 (2013), pp. 125–45.
79
Mel Porter and Alastair J. Reid, ‘Today’s toughest policy problems: how history can help’
(2010), <http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-100.html>.
80
Lorie Charlesworth, ‘England’s early “big society”: parish welfare under the Old Poor Law’
(2010), <http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-108.html>.

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 JOHN TOSH 209

Poor were both legally binding, resulting in a comprehensive system of

relief throughout England. Charlesworth describes this as the ‘earliest of
human rights’, in place long before the language of human rights came
into existence. The 1834 Act began the mutation of this system into one
in which a longstanding mutuality of rights, duties and obligations was
erased. The modern conventions of welfare amount to a piecemeal
dismantling of historic popular rights.
By contrast Pat Thane’s 2010 paper ‘Happy Families’ exposes the
structural defects which disfigured English family life in the supposed
Golden Age of the Victorians. Her account is a rebuttal of the popular
belief that in recent generations the moral quality of family life in
Britain has suffered a catastrophic decline.81 She points out that many of
the problems that are assumed to be the distinctive failing of the present
generation have an extended past, though not necessarily for exactly the
same reasons. Thus lone parenthood was extremely common because of
the death of a partner. Divorce rates were low because prior to 1858
divorce was extremely costly and thus available only to the few; if the
procedure had been easier, divorce would have been widely taken up,
given the incidence of domestic violence (well documented for the nine-
teenth century). Nor was premarital sex an invention of the 1960s: the
registering of marriages and baptisms proves that for centuries a sig-
nificant proportion of first births were conceived before marriage. In so
far as the Golden Age has any basis in history, it is the unprecedented
stability of the family in the decade or so after the Second World War.
The implication of Thane’s argument is not to make light of the prob-
lems of family life today, but to protect the present generation against
the spurious charge that ‘we’ have destroyed the golden legacy of the
past.
These two examples are representative of the History & Policy site in
that, compared with the emphasis of public history during and after the
First World War, they address domestic issues. But History & Policy
has also made significant contributions to the public understanding of
foreign issues. At the time of the Iraq War, two papers appeared which
critiqued the prevailing assumptions about the likely post-war situation
in Iraq, but this was so early in the history of the site that their impact
was limited.82 More recently Stephanie Cronin has analysed the pros-
pects for military stability in Afghanistan, on which US 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

81
Pat Thane, ‘Happy families? History and policy’ (2010), <http://www.historyandpolicy.org/
papers/policy-paper-107.html. See also John Tosh, Why History Matters (Basingstoke, 2008),
ch. 5.
82
Beverley Milton-Edwards, ‘Iraq, past, present and future: a thoroughly-modern mandate?’
(2003), <http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-13.html>; John W. Dower, ‘Don’t
expect democracy this time: Japan and Iraq’ (2003), <http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/
policy-paper-10.html>.

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210 PUBLIC HISTORY

the army has been too costly to achieve without foreign assistance
(British, Soviet or US), but this undermines its local legitimacy. As in
1928 and 1992 the army has then disintegrated, leaving the field open to
tribal elements. This see-saw has been at the root of much of the civil
conflict in Afghanistan’s past, and Cronin concludes that it is likely to
characterize Afghanistan’s future after western forces have left.83

VIII
Any venture in applied history is far enough removed from the ethos of
mainstream scholarship to prompt questions about its academic creden-
tials. In saying that history must be defended ‘from the immediate
demands of the market-place, from the day-to-day dictates of journal-
ism and the mass media’, Mandler could well have had History & Policy
in mind. The implication is that responding to topicality undermines
scholarship. If most of the contributors to the website were journalists
and politicians seeking a historical imprimatur for a pet remedy, there
would be cause for concern. But the reality is different. The initiative to
write a paper for the website comes not from the media but from the
individual historian (or more rarely from the site’s editors). The authors
are professional historians reporting on the practical significance of
research pursued for academic reasons – in some cases research whose
topical relevance could not have been anticipated when it was under-
taken. Far from being publicists, they are scholars who acknowledge
that their expertise has a public dimension which requires them to enter
the public sphere from time to time. The papers are characterized by the
modes of historical thinking found in academic scholarship. They make
repeated use of the antithesis between continuity and change, being
particularly attentive to claims of novelty; they seek to identify enabling
conditions in the past and whether these still apply today; and they
track historical processes which are still unfolding in the present.84 Only
in the citing of analogies do contributors step beyond academic conven-
tion. But they do not do so prescriptively, but as an aid to open-ended
thinking. It is the comparison of things which are not exactly compa-
rable which enables us to draw creatively on the diversity of the past.85
In one respect History & Policy fails to reproduce the full practical
potential of historical discourse. Just as professional historians advance
understanding through debate, so too historical perspective in current
affairs should be treated as a matter for argument in which compet-
ing interpretations are aired in public. As the theory of deliberative

83
Stephanie Cronin, ‘Afghanistan’s armies, past and present’ (2010), <http://www
.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-105.html>.
84
Szreter, ‘History and public policy’, pp. 223–4, 228.
85
For a fuller discussion, see John Tosh, ‘In defence of applied history: the History & Policy
website’ (2006), <http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-37.html>. The argument is
placed in a wider historiographical frame in Tosh, Why History Matters.

© 2014 The Author. History © 2014 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
 JOHN TOSH 211

democracy would suggest, submitting alternative options to the test of

evidence and reason is the mark of a mature citizenry. The public
interventions of historians should not therefore be seen as a means of
settling issues for good, but as a means of allowing public issues to be
discussed with greater discrimination and insight. Contributors seldom
engage in dialogue, diminishing history’s capacity to bring to light alter-
natives and to provide material for productive argument. In twelve
years of the website there have been only two occasions when contribu-
tors have been explicitly lined up against each other in debate.86
In judging the success of History & Policy a distinction must be
drawn between its impact on policy-makers and its impact on civil
society. History & Policy has from the beginning held both in its sights.
But it is much easier to evaluate the contacts made with government
departments. There is no way of measuring the wider civic impact of the
website, except to log the visitors to the site. In 2007–8 there were 53,159
visitors; in 2011–12 the total increased to 132,234; several papers have
achieved more than 10,000 page views.87 This growth rate would seem to
be attributable to both the topicality of newly commissioned papers and
the availability of all previous papers (dating back to 2002) as a data
bank. Tight editorial control on the length and format of the policy
papers contributes to their impact. The website also posts shorter
opinion pieces, many of them immediate responses to policy announce-
ments. Journalists draw on the website, though usually without attribu-
tion. Conversely History & Policy offers historians advice on how best
to gain access to the media.
History & Policy is not the last word on critical public history, but it
represents a significant step in that direction – in the range of public
issues that it addresses, the speed with which it can offer historical
orientation, and the diversity of audience that it reaches. Far from being
the project of a few enthusiasts, History & Policy now draws on a
significant proportion of the historical profession. In addition to the
authors published on the website, History & Policy also holds a data-
base comprising nearly 400 historians who are willing to provide brief-
ings or to contribute to policy events.88 To refer to these scholars as
public historians is misleading if it suggests an exclusive commitment to
public outreach. ‘Historians in public’ perhaps better conveys the preva-
lent pattern of historians who work in academia but who intervene in
public when they have something material to contribute to public
understanding. To an extent which seemed unlikely when the website

86
History & Policy carried debates between Frank Trentmann (<http://www.historyandpolicy.org/
papers/policy-paper-31.html>) and Gareth Stedman Jones (<http://www.historyandpolicy.org/
papers/policy-paper-30.html>) on poverty in 2005; and between John Arnold (<http://www
.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-80.html>), Ludmilla Jordanova (<http://www
.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-81.html>) and John Tosh (<http://www.historyandpolicy
.org/papers/policy-paper-79.html>) on applied history in 2008.
87
Data from Google Analytics, accessed by History & Policy, 29 July 2013.
88
<http://www.historyandpolicy.org>, accessed 11 Nov. 2013.

© 2014 The Author. History © 2014 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
212 PUBLIC HISTORY

was founded in 2002, History & Policy has overcome much of the
traditional reluctance of historians to go public in this way.

IX
As Graeme Davison has acknowledged, ‘the connection between his-
torical knowledge and responsible citizenship is far from clear.’89 The
confusion arises from the different meanings of citizenship. Today it is
widely regarded as a discourse of identity, inclusion and loyalty. It
stands recognizably in the tradition of patriotic citizenship so strongly
promoted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, except
that the theme is no longer national cohesion tout court, but the recon-
ciling of national identity with a multicultural society. The National
Curriculum and strategies of public commemoration bear witness to
these priorities. Yet when citizenship was the subject of intense political
debate during the early years of the New Labour government, great
emphasis was placed by Bernard Crick and others on promoting the
citizen’s capacity to vote intelligently and to participate in public life.90
In responding to that challenge, historians sometimes forget that they
can draw on more than a century of participation in civic discourse.
They might recall that the case was eloquently put by William Stubbs
(not least because he is usually recognized as the founding father of the
academic profession of history in Britain) at the point when represen-
tative democracy in Britain acquired a mass base. During the First
World War (with the Historical Association to the fore) historians
reacted to the national crisis in critical and reflective mode, and in so
doing created models for history as a resource for participatory democ-
racy. History & Policy develops that tradition, while taking full advan-
tage of the resources of the internet to reach out to the public.
Viewed as an exercise in public history, supplying citizens with critical
perspectives on current affairs hardly requires justification. As voter and
as activist, the citizen stands to benefit, both individually and through
the associations to which she or he belongs. The problem lies in the
awkward fit with the rest of the public history field. In community-led
public history academics take second place beside the locals; in heritage-
led history they act in tandem with heritage professionals, sometimes
also subject to community inputs. Alone among the current variants,
critical public history is practised almost exclusively by the academic
profession. It would do no harm if historians took credit for this very
distinctive contribution to the public good.

89
Graeme Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History (St Leonards, 2000), p. 273.
90
Advisory Group on Citizenship, Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (1998)
[the Crick Report]; Bernard Crick, Essays on Citizenship (London, 2000).

© 2014 The Author. History © 2014 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd