Book Review

Like the work of some other American historians, that of David Glassberg has been taken up by scholars in Australia and elsewhere, not simply for the purpose of teaching American history outside the United States but for a range of interdisciplinary courses in public history and in museum and heritage studies within an international framework. His award-winning article on memory and place published in the Public Historian in 1996, which forms the basis of the introductory chapter to this book, had a significant impact because it drew together a range of seemingly disparate fields from the academy to an applied area of historical practice. In turn it helped to make public history something more than just work: he helped to make it an exciting field of historical inquiry, to which an understanding of belonging and place is central.

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These links have been fruitfully drawn together again in this articulate and lucidly written collection of essays, which extend his previous work with a series of case studies. They are timely, moving away from books about those who produce histories to showing how those histories are received, consumed, or practiced—depending on one's political perspective and the site of study. Glassberg's great achievement is to demonstrate how the personal or "intimate places for learning about the past, interact with the public ones." So we never lose sight of individual humanity in the study of the collective responses to parades, images, memorials, and films. In this sense he is building on the growing field of "histories of the present"—the studies of historical consciousness or historical sensibilities, to which a number of American scholars such as David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig, Mike Wallace and Sam Wineburg have all made distinctive contributions. However, few of these specifically address the field of public history and bring wider scholarship to bear on this strangely hybrid form.

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