Category: Contemporary History

The English word “public history” (PH) is used, discussed, contested, denigrated, or, as we thought, finally considered a useful concept for explaining and framing long-standing practices in the humanities and history in Italy. Those who practised what has been called “the discipline without a name” recognised themselves in a theoretical-practical framework that attributed scientific status to many cultural projects conceived together with the public and for the territorial communities, and which concerned the critical and participatory actualisation of the study of the past and memory, and reflections on its public presence as a civic right to history in democratic societies.