Several years ago, my father visited me in Northern Virginia. Living just outside Washington, D.C., finding something he would be interested in seeing was rarely difficult. He asked me to take him to the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udavr-Hazy Center in Chantilly, with a specific aircraft in mind. Dad wanted to see the Vietnam era Cessna O-1A BIRD DOG. We found it suspended in one of the side halls, and something happened I did not expect. My father served in Vietnam as an advisor to the Vietnamese Navy, but never spoke much about it until the early ‘00s. That day in the museum, looking at this tiny plane that carried observers and Forward Air Controllers, he started telling me about his jaunts as a passenger during the war.  As he was sharing his exploits, I noticed out of  the corner of my eye people were edging toward us, eavesdropping. The BIRD DOG, for a few minutes, was more than an exhibit, but lived again for my father and his small audience, it once again flew over the Mekong River Delta with a daring pilot and his passenger. 

At the time, I thought it made a sweet and charming story, of my father sharing his experiences and accidentally educating other visitors. It is not Grele’s central idea, however in his closing paragraphs he says this about public history: “It promises us a society in which the broader public participates in the construction of its own history.” In any public history project, how the audience relates to the content is a critical component.¹

The title Grele chose for his discussion of public history is on point for thinking about the relationship between the audience and content, asking “Whose Public? Whose History…” Although his main ideas relate more to defining and understanding what is a public historian and their changing roles within the community of historians, he touches on the relationships, offering public history projects and practitioners as guides in how the audience accesses and uses content to develop their own knowledge and help shape their understanding of the world. 

Corbett and Miller’s “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry” offers several examples of how the audience and content, and sometimes funding, create opportunities and tensions when developing content. It was the anecdote Corbett begins the article with that made me think of my father’s visit. She is interviewing a woman to better the documentation behind some photographs, who identifies one as being herself and sister.  This led to wider involvement with the community Corbett was studying and a richer understanding of the history. Corbett explains as the interviews continued she and her subjects shared the inquiry and authority over how the content developed. The exhibit made these women feel like partners in the endeavor, although she kept the decision making authority. In this case, the audience led to a fuller story than could be told otherwise.²

Understanding how the audience will use the content, in both the physical and intellectual way can drive what content is presented. Histories of the National Mall had to decide who the audience for the site would be, the best means of getting the information to them, and the sustainability of the content. By selecting visiting tourists as a primary audience, the project had to start with the best platform for accessibility, choosing to develop an Omeka site viewable on a smartphone instead of an application, and the wifi support for visitors to the Mall. Content was arranged to allow the audience to choose what they were interested in learning more about (personally, I’m intrigued by the Cherry Tree Protest).

Audiences and content should not be separated in planning a public history project as they affect each other. In considering content, the effect on the audiences is an important factor – will it inspire, trouble, educate, entertain, welcome or exclude the intended audience. Similarly, the desired response of the audience is equally important, as well as how the content is displayed and accessed.³

1. Ronald J Grele, “Whose Public? Whose History? What is the Goal of a Public Historian?” The Public Historian, Vol 3, No.1 (Winter 1981, p. 48 ↩︎
2. Katherine T. Corbett and Howard (Dick) Miller, “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry,” Public Historian, Vol 28, No. 1 (Winter 2006) at http://www.jstor.org/stable/101525/tph.2006.28.1.15, pp. 15-16. ↩︎
3.  Cherry Tree Protest at Jefferson Memorial Site,” Histories of the National Mall, accessed March 4, 2024, https://mallhistory.org/items/show/208. ↩︎