Turning nature into history: The professionalization of public history in the National Park Service during the 1930s.

摘要

This dissertation analyzes the formation of the National Park Service History Division in order to track the professionalization of public history. Debates about the relationship of public historical production to academic professional standards have dominated the field's discourse for the past 25 years. As a result, public historians both inside and outside the academy have been reluctant to theorize the ways in which their profession is distinct from that of their academic peers. Yet, a close reading of the early days of Park Service history demonstrates the persistence of particular themes and concerns in the larger field of public history. Over the following four chapters, this dissertation theorizes and historicizes persistent sources of conflict in the field of public history; namely, the role of public history in mediating vernacular and official authority, the tensions that emerge between public historians and their audiences, and the insecurity that marks relationships between public historians and their academic peers.;Historical professionalism has roots in the Progressive Era. As a result, historically specific trends in commemoration, preservation and collection established particular relationships among public historians, academics, audience constituencies and agents of official culture and government authority. This configuration set the stage for the creation of a unique habitus---or work culture---that we now recognize as public history.;Public history's transformation from avocation to profession took place in the years between World War I and World War II. During these decades, several landholding institutions inside the federal government engaged in a series of power struggles concerning the governance of land and the ownership of artifacts. One of these power struggles, between the Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution, contributed to the creation of a new way of assigning meaning to artifacts. It also reconfigured the relationships among science, history, landscapes and meaning, establishing intellectual parameters for public history.;In addition, during these decades, the maturation of mass culture and the ascendance of middle class professionalism created some anxiety about the power of official authority. Audience desires, far from simply outside sources of controversy, became embedded inside the discourse that is public history. Further, public history might have been better served by imagining academics as simply another audience constituency. However, by situating them as the guardians of standards and the gatekeepers of historical meaning, early public historians structured their own authority as inherently insecure.