When historians work they, like any creator, are creating content for a specific audience. There is always a target demographic that every type of historian is looking to appease. A large part of the work that historians create is meant for a purely academic audience that consists of their fellow historians. It these instances they are creating scholarly content to engage with academic debates with their fellow historians. However, not all historians create content for a purely academic audience. A notable exception can be found in public historians.
As the name implies, public historians largely work with and create content for an audience consisting of the general public, meaning individuals who are not academically trained historians. As Denise Meringolo states in her book Museums, Monuments, and National Parks, “Public historians can produce original interpretations that connect scholarship and everyday life by respecting the ways in which their partners and audiences use history and by balancing professional authority against community needs.” (168) It is ultimately public historians that bring together the academic community and the general public in the projects they create. The projects that public historians create are meant to be experienced by a wide ranging audience that come from diverse demographic backgrounds. As a result, the general public has a large role in determining the types of content found in public history projects.
At all stages of creating a public history project, it is important to take into account how the general public audience will experience and interact with the project. Any public history project should be created with a goal of marketing it to a large scale audience. The project Histories of the National Mall provides a perfect example of a project created with the goal of being used by a large public audience. As stated in the project guide, “We decided that our primary users would be the 25 million tourists who visit the
Mall each year.” (8) Determining that the primary audience of the project would be anyone who came to visit the National Mall, meant that the project content had to be accessible to a large number of people in an outdoor space. The project team reflected this in the design of the project stating, “Our key strategy for making the history of the National Mall engaging for tourists was to create a website designed for hand-held devices, populated with surprising
and compelling stories and primary sources that together build a textured historical context for the space and how it has changed over time.” (4) Creating a website allows the project’s content to be viewed by the public in a way that is engaging to them while they are physically present on the National Mall. Histories of the National Mall is a prime example of the nature of the project’s audience shaped the way that the project’s content was presented to them.
Throughout the development of a project, public input can play a key role to both reinforce or change the direction of the project and the the type of content it contains. Since public history projects are created for the public, it is important that they have a say in the type of content that projects create. To be successful, a project has to peak the interest of the public and encourage them to engage with the project. In his essay “Creating a Dialogic Museum: The Chinatown History Museum Experiment,” John Kuo Wei Tchen describes how the Chinatown History Museum in New York City used interactions with their target audiences to shape the content offered in their exhibits. “Laundry workers, for example , asked why our Eight Pound Livelihood exhibition had more photographs showing laundrymen than photographs showing the work process. We learned from their comments that they would have represented laundry life in an exhibition very differently than the CHM staff had.” (310) By engaging with the audience the staff at the Chinatown History Museum were able to adapt and change the content of their exhibit to make it more meaningful for the intended audience. This is one example of using public opinion to create a public history project that has a greater meaning for its audiences.
While public history projects are created by historians with their own interpretations of history, the public audience for their project ultimately play a major role in determining the content of said project. The public historian has to create content that is engaging to the public and invites them to interact with the project. As a result, the project content has to appeal to the whatever the target demographic group the project creator has in mind when working on the project.
