This post is an introduction to our online symposium, ‘The Voices of the People’. For more information on this event see our symposium homepage.

Mark Hailwood

The doors of the ivory tower are being dismantled, and it’s no bad thing that historians are being forced out of hiding. Indeed, debates about the role that professional academic historians should be playing in wider society seem as pressing as they have done for many years – not least because research funding has come to be increasingly linked with the requirement to demonstrate that the resulting research has ‘impact’ on the economy, society, culture, or public policy, ‘beyond academia’. Historians are finding their voices, and are starting to intervene in public debates with greater regularity.

‘Is it safe to come out?’

The resulting interventions have not been without controversy, as the recent exchanges in History Today over the historic role of Britain in Europe have shown. In fact, much of the public debate involving historians is really a debate between them about the type of history we should be doing. The History Manifesto, a recent high profile open access publication, called for historians to focus their efforts on the analysis of ‘big data’ and very long-term trends so as to make their conclusions more applicable to contemporary policy questions. Yet the authors of the manifesto, and the Eurosceptic ‘Historians for Britain’ collective, have been criticised for leaning towards over-simplified ‘big stories’ and clear ‘lessons from history’ at the expense of the complexity and nuance that many see as central to what the study of history should really be about (something our own Laura Sangha has written about on this blog recently).

But debates about the type of history that is best suited to bridging the gap between academics and a wider public need to be about more than just the scale we adopt: there is also the issue of what – or who – that broader public history should be focusing on. Great institutions, great men, and national stories of war and conquest, have long dominated our collective sense of the past: the historical experiences of ordinary women and men, it is fair to say, have not. It is telling that The People’s History Museum in Manchester, the UK’s principal museum for working class history, has lost government funding because it is not considered to be a ‘national’ museum: the history of ordinary people is not part of the national story. Telling too that the Prime Minister, in a speech to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, saw human rights as ‘the legacy, the idea, the momentous achievement of those barons’. No place here for the Trade Unions, Chartists, Suffragettes – and countless other grassroots movements across the world – that have fought for the rights of ordinary citizens: for Mr Cameron it was the barons wot won it. Continue reading →