The Past as a Public Good: The US National Park Service and ‘Cultural Repair’ in Post-Industrial Places

Abstract

The practice of public history in the US, as elsewhere, has always had a paradoxical quality. Although it draws primarily on vernacular and local materials, it has often depended on the support of government at many levels. Indeed, as Ludmilla Jordanova has suggested, the state is at the very heart of public history.¹ Inflected by a generally left-leaning political sensibility, the work of American public historians has nonetheless frequently contributed — in ways that this chapter will discuss — to projects that preserve rather than challenge status quo relationships of power and inequality. And the field’s expansion and professionalisation over the past three decades has in many ways worked against practitioners’ own goals of fostering broad public participation in historical inquiry and expression.