The public history movement in North America that was born amid the academic job crisis of the late 1970s aspired to a radical reformation of professional history’s audience from an inward focused conversation among professionals to one working with government and corporate institutions and in dialogue with the public. This essay focuses on the institutional evolution of the National Council on Public History (NCPH) to illustrate the unexpected, but not entirely unpropitious outcome that flowed from the failure of the organization’s original goals. How that movement failed and what it succeeded in creating may hold useful lessons for the contemporary public humanities campaign. In the late twentieth century, the public history movement failed to bring about a major reorientation of professional and academic history. In the attempt, however, it created an off shot of public history as one of a number of new but distinctly separate fields of academic historical practice. Unexpectedly, public history became a new academic specialty alongside other new fields from that era: native American history, environmental history, and gender history.

This article makes the case for unearthing a long history of public humanities. The story begins with the very emergence of universities in the United States and continues through key moments where people of color and Indigenous people have shaped the history of public humanities. Risam makes the case against allowing the novelty of the term “public humanities” to erase this history and for resisting cooptation of public humanities by the neoliberal university.

Museums and news organizations make up major parts of the structure that maintains an informed community essential to democracy. As resources for both of these institutions dwindle, it’s more important than ever for these sectors to work together toward their common goals – not only with each other, but with their respective communities in ways that are collaborative and egalitarian. The following outlines Civil Wrongs, a program started at the University of Memphis Department of Journalism and Strategic Media in 2022, as an emerging example of how these institutions can work together and learn from each other for the sake of a more informed community. Civil Wrongs is both a journalistic project of the nonprofit Institute for Public Service Reporting, and an academic class for junior and senior college students from multiple disciplines, including journalism, history, and political science. Through narrative podcasting, the program aims to examine past cases of racial terror in the Mid-South and analyze their connection to present-day injustices. It is a break from the traditional journalistic model that focuses solely on the present with little historical context and therefore naturally creates a bridge to museums that are grounded in history education.

Our contemporary understanding of political corruption draws from two different sources, a modern view that corruption occurs where officials follow improper procedures and a more ancient view of corruption as a systemic failure to live up to political ideals. The ability to shift between these views makes it easy for political partisans to locate corruption where it suits their political interests. Since accusations of corruption easily become challenges to the legitimacy of officeholders and institutions, there is danger in carelessness with the language of corruption. Awareness of these circumstances should lead us to be cautious with the language of corruption and to resist its slide toward becoming a mere means of political struggle.

We present two examples of how the environmental humanities have built bridges with governments and made effective policy interventions. Lessons can be drawn about how public humanities can help develop social and cultural understanding and societal resilience.

This essay delves into a pivotal incident where Edward Said’s Palestinian identity collided with entrenched conservative American values, revealing the dichotomy of his dual role as a Columbia University professor and outspoken advocate for Palestinian statehood. The catalyst was a provocative article, “Edward Said Accused of Stoning in South Lebanon,” from the Columbia Daily Spectator. Said, renowned for his incisive critique of Western depictions of the East and the global dissemination of “orientalism,” brazenly condemned American foreign policy, particularly its support for Israel’s colonial expansion. I examine the episode’s portrayal in the New York Times and Columbia Daily Spectator, highlighting Edward Said’s seemingly conflicting intellectual legacy. Drawing from his essays like “On Nelson Mandela, and Others” (1994), “Homage to a Belly Dancer” (1990), and the memoir “Out of Place” (1999), I explore Said’s views on the public intellectual’s role in America. This investigation probes whether Said’s public identity aligns with his academic persona, and how visibility shapes his concept of the “public.” It questions if public intellectuals can maintain autonomy within academia or if they inevitably conform to university norms.

Inspired in large part by the author’s residence on the grounds of a former plantation in Stafford County, Virginia, Sparking Freedom highlights local stories of enslaved resistance. The program incorporates stops at multiple National Park Service sites, as well as several other historic locations and the Fredericksburg Area Museum. Combining historical documentation and archival research, the tour features accounts of enslaved resistance including an uprising of enslaved men at Chatham Plantation in the winter of 1805, the story of Anthony Burns, an enslaved man who escaped to Boston in 1853 but was later apprehended under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and enslaved individuals like Bethany Veney who resisted sales and auctions. Sparking Freedom is a highly personal example of innovative and engaging public history work honoring enslaved communities.

Drawing upon findings from an Imagining America research project funded by the Mellon Foundation (2019–2023), this research paper and manifesto proposes five critical ways in which institutions of higher education can better support public humanities. Through over one hundred individual interviews, twenty multimedia case studies, a national graduate scholar survey, an online study group, and public conversations, we learned how public scholars have consistently conducted research that matters – responding to urgent challenges in the world, including on the pressing ecological, social, racial, and economic justice issues of our time. However, the diverse inter-generational Imagining America (IA) research team also found that most academic institutions are still not designed to support this important work. By favoring narrow disciplinary boundaries and norms and individualized methods over collective commitments and reciprocal partnerships, most institutions marginalize and disincentivize public humanities. Our research respondents overwhelmingly agreed that instead of change initiatives led from the top of the university, publicly engaged scholars themselves lead the way by virtue of their groundbreaking collaborative, relational, reflective, critical yet hopeful grounded research. The manifesto shared at the end of the paper proposes how to support this important work today.

The future of public humanities will be determined by the infrastructural investments that support its continued development. These include, in the context of the United States, increased federal funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities; a serious re-engagement in the material support of new humanities scholarly production by private foundations; and a focused effort by humanities organizations to cultivate philanthropic donors. This manifesto argues that the humanities are the rightful inheritance of every person, regardless of background or position. If we are to take seriously both the resource needs of humanities research—which demand that funds be allocated for highly trained scholars to read, interpret, authenticate, preserve, and circulate primary source material—and the idea that no one has a higher claim than anyone else to these sources and processes and the insights they yield—which demands that individuals outside of the academy explicitly experience them selves as equal participants in the humanities—then our approach to both research infrastructure and public engagement must radically shift to emphasize repair. Repair, here, is the interpersonal, intellectual, strategic, repetitious, time-intensive work of ensuring that every individual can claim this rightful cultural inheritance. It is the work of creating the conditions for encounters between individuals and the vastness of history, culture, and difference. The future of public humanities must be in the creation of replicable models for these encounters, in the knowledge that in every instance, the work of the humanities is and must be unreproducible.

I ran the online classics publication Eidolon from 2015 to 2020. Eidolon sought to make Classics “personal and political, feminist and fun,” publishing more than 500 articles and receiving 3 million total views in its five years of active existence. Because our editors (and many of our writers) were scholars who grew up consuming and producing digital content, we were able to bring a measure of academic rigor and methodology to inform urgent personal and timely essays. Eidolon’s position as both insiders and outsiders to the discipline of Classics made it uniquely suited to address some of the most challenging and necessary conversations facing the field, from white supremacist classical appropriation online to sexual harassment and racial discrimination within the discipline. But the lack of institutional support that allowed total freedom also made the publication vulnerable and contributed to its closure in late 2020. It’s wonderful to have fans, but a publication also needs champions. I argue that, for an online publication to be exciting and fresh but also resilient, it must maintain a delicate balance between fearlessly commenting on the most pressing issues of the day (without, perhaps, waiting for the temporal distance and perspective that academics usually prefer!) while still cultivating the institutional support necessary to weather inevitable challenges. And, most importantly, you need to have fun while doing it.

How do we do public scholarship? It might seem like a simple question, but as anyone who has attempted to experiment with academic norms—let alone work collaboratively in and through institutional regulations, cultural expectations, and diverse personalities—is well aware, things get complicated quickly. As scholars, practitioners, and educators in the public humanities, the authors offer a set of sticky and thorny questions that are both theoretically minded and practice oriented, as possibilities to consider throughout the process of working on public projects or with community partners. Questions are grouped thematically—Framing, Planning, Partnerships, Institutions, Tools, Outputs and Forms, Documentation, Evaluation and Reflection—though are not meant to be exhaustive or prescriptive. In so doing, the essay insists that public scholarship not be codified into a clearly-defined discipline, but rather acknowledged as both an always already present practice for many scholars and in a constant state of emergence as a field. To that end, the authors also invite direct engagement with these questions, both inside and outside of the space of the text, encouraging readers to generate and share their own questions as well.

The civil war in Sudan, often overshadowed by other global conflicts, has deep roots in the country’s colonial past and ongoing struggles with governance. Despite early hopes for democracy, the situation deteriorated, leading to widespread violence and humanitarian crises. The war has seen mass displacement and severe restrictions on communication. Academia cannot remain silent in the face of such events. More importantly, we need to re-centre our practices from the outset, not just during in times of war. Archaeology plays a crucial role in this endeavour, but only if it actively moves away from its colonial past. The archaeological project at Jebel Moya is a fully joint collaboration between Sudanese archaeologists and those based in the Global North. It highlights the intersection of archaeology and contemporary conflict, underscoring the importance of equitable partnerships in post–colonial contexts. The narrative calls for international support for Sudanese scholars and students, emphasizing the need for flexibility, assistance, and a platform for Sudanese voices in the global academic community.

Lately, my students have been asking: “Why should we be here, when there are people suffering out there?” Evidently, they are asking about the public value of higher education. But they are also asking old questions, some of the oldest that human beings have seen fit to ask. Versions of these questions appear in all scriptural traditions, in ancient and modern philosophical works, in stories and novels and songs. They are questions at the core of what we call “the humanities.” Part of why we study the humanities – and why we must – is to get help in asking, articulating, and trying to answer such questions. There aren’t single right answers to any of those questions. Each of us must work answers out for ourselves. But we can work out better answers for ourselves if we spend time in the company of others who take those questions seriously. This is not just an individual task; it’s a collective task of great public import. In this short piece, I defend the idea of the public humanities on these terms.

Stew (born Mark Stewart) is a punk rocker and musical theater writer and performer. This profile combines new interviews of Stew with an analysis of his Tony Award-winning musical Passing Strange, which was recently revived in the West End, to illuminate how his rock music-inspired persona influences his approach to creating musicals.

Kamala Harris is the first American Presidential Candidate to understand TikTok. Both her personal feed and campaign feed demonstrate this understanding. This essay will unpack what it means to create TikTok native content, and how Harris is doing so on TikTok.

Researchers need to reach a new academic normal in which virtually every piece of scholar-facing humanities work generates a public-facing writing component. This essay recounts interactions with a colleague who, in a curriculum meeting, described public humanities as “a hobby.” I suggest arguments and strategies to lead skeptical colleagues to re-envision the value and possibilities – and occasional dangers and pitfalls – of the public humanities. Public writing is a practice that academic humanists should regularly engage in and a mode we must be willing to teach in order to win back public trust in higher education and to reinvigorate humanities research at a time of precarity.

In 1823, the first edition of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the manuscript of John Milton’s theological work De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine) were both discovered after having been lost to history for centuries. These literary discoveries were subsequently published in 1825, challenging the established perspectives of them: the one as the one as the infallible magician of the stage, and the other as the juggernaut Christian poet. These two documents reshaped how scholars thought about them and their legacies. Shakespeare became a man at work, trafficking in a messy theater and printing culture. Milton became a theological outlaw, increasingly resembling to some his epic’s grand antagonist.

Graduate career development has grown over recent years with increasing interest in public scholarship and career diversity. In interviews with 41 public humanities leaders, participants agreed that public humanities introduces students to various career opportunities through community-engaged work and allows them to develop skills needed for those careers, such as event planning and fundraising. Some participants also noted that career diversity is becoming an important area of public humanities leadership roles. However, participants shared that faculty have not been formally prepared for their public humanities roles, and, in turn, faculty have not been prepared to teach graduate students for public humanities or career diversity. How do faculty prepare students for opportunities when they do not feel prepared for those same opportunities? This piece offers answers to that question.

The essay aims at discussing visual arts and gender issues, with specific reference to models for female empowerment by means of aesthetic paradigm shifts. These took place thanks to pioneering video artists in the 1990s and were then upheld by new millennium music pop stars in highly influential videoclips. I argue that videos by artists such as Pipilotti Rist, Cheryl Donegan, Mona Hatoum, Andrea Fraser, and Susan Hiller matter today for how they tackled gender issues by means of the moving image, especially by challenging the male gaze and creating gender specific perspectives long before women could claim a similar influence on the television business and in the movie industry. They offered ground-breaking strategies in visual representation and video narratives of considerable impact since they were later adopted in public life, particularly through female pop stars’ aesthetic transfer into music videoclips, such as with Beyoncé. In this regard, I observe how art historical references are applied in recent videoclips to challenge the male gaze, letting a threefold strategy emerge: thematic reprise, iconographic substitution, and aesthetic transposition.

In the 2020 video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the player builds the collection of the impressive Animal Crossing Museum (ACM). Exploring the visitor experience of this video game museum’s art wing from the perspective of museum professionals allows for the discovery of inventive ways to deepen connection with museum patrons in the virtual space. The ACM is more successful at engaging visitors than traditional virtual museums. It meets visitor needs by offering an immersive, interactive experience, and depends on direct action from the visitor to expand and grow its collection and space. By taking lessons from the player interaction design of the ACM, virtual museums can be designed to meet the psychological needs of visitors and build long-lasting relationships between the visitor and the institution. From the text, this essay proposes seven lessons for designing virtual museums: start with visitor experience at the center of virtual museum design, allow the visitor to collaborate on the creation of the virtual museum, make the virtual museum a habit with intermittent rewards and increased access over time, build social interaction into the virtual museum, add an avatar, show off curator personality, and address colonial roots of museums.