America's Public Historical Area Of Research And Theory Methods

Public History, as a branch of history, has risen in the mid-1970s, which now has become an important subject in American history circles, and has aroused widespread concern in the whole society. This article will mainly introduce three research areas of the Public History, summarize the theories and methods used in Public History, and give some opinions on its significance to our domestic historical practice.This article is composed of three parts:the preface, main body and conclusion. The preface describes the significance of the topic and its research status at home and abroad, as well as summarizing the research trends of Public History on basis of the periodical The Public Historian.The main body is divided into three chapters. The first chapter discusses three main areas of Public History, including teaching, media and memory. In teaching area, it narrates the purpose of establishment of public history course and the specific requirements for designing public history program. The connection with media changes the mode of transmission to historical researching results and the way of popularity to public history knowledge. As the rising interest in memory, public historians are mainly concerned about the interleaving and collision of different memories in the public areas. The second chapter summarized theories and methods mainly taken in Public History. For the theories, different from the traditional trend of emphasizing major political and military events, public historians maintain to study all the fields and areas included in history by using multiple historical theories. Public historians constantly collapse the authority of the traditional history by means of the postmodernism theory in the process of studying history and writing history. For the methods, the methods of public history are interdisciplinary, personal experiencing, teamwork, oral history and psychological history. At last, we can learn from the successful experiences obtained by American Public History. The third chapter will mainly focus on the enlightenment of American Public History to Chinese historiography. So we can learn how to cultivate public historians and how to advance the socialization of historical knowledge.The conclusion summarizes the background that American Public History occurs, the rethinking to Chinese historiography from some domestic historians and the significance to develop Public History in China.