- The Oxford Handbook of Public History
- Dedication
- List of Contributors
- The Past and Future of Public History: Developments and Challenges
- Internationalizing Public History
- Complexity and Collaboration: Doing Public History in Digital Environments
- Decentralizing Culture: Public History and Communities
- Trading Zones: Collaborative Ventures in Disability History
- Popular Understandings of the Past: Interpreting History through Graphic Novels
- The Business of History: Customers, Professionals, and Money
- Public Histories for Human Rights: Sites of Conscience and the Guantánamo Public Memory Project
- Archives for Justice, Archives of Justice
- Sexuality and the Cities: Interdisciplinarity and the Politics of Queer Public History
- Public History and the Environment
- From Environmental Liability to Community Asset: Public History, Communities, and Environmental Reclamation
- Between Pastness and Presentism: Public History and Local Food Activism
- Historians and Public History in the UN System
- Good Enough for Government Work
- Shaping Institutional Memory: Public History on Capitol Hill
- History, Heritage, and the Representation of Ethnic Diversity: Cultural Tourism in China
- Public History, Cultural Institutions, and National Identity: Dialogues about Difference
- History Museums and Identity: Finding “Them,” “Me,” and “Us” in the Gallery
- National Museums, National Narratives, and Identity Politics
- The Personalization of Loss in Memorial Museums
- The Magna Carta: 800 Years of Public History
- Public History as a Social Form of Knowledge
- Brownfield Public History: Arts and Heritage in the Aftermath of Deindustrialization
- Politics and Memory: How Germans Face Their Past
- The Legacy of Collecting: Colonial Collecting in the Belgian Congo and the Duty of Unveiling Provenance
- Slavery Tourism: Representing a Difficult History in Ghana
- How You Understand Your Story: The Survival Story within Cambodian American Genocide Communities
- In the Service of the State: Monuments and Memorials in Indonesia
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter considers the business of history in the context of the common business mission to satisfy customers and employees while generating sufficient profits to sustain the enterprise. It emphasizes the customer’s role in defining markets for history and explores how customers value history to establish identity, to obtain and apply historical knowledge, or for entertainment. It argues that history businesses need professional historians who are competitive, collaborative, and capable while suggesting criteria for good history and skill sets for marketable historians. Finally, it briefly highlights the role of money in fueling and measuring business success while challenging the notion that history produced for a profit is inherently untrustworthy.
Keywords: business, market, customers, professional historians, profit
Brian W. Martin is the president of History Associates, Inc., based in Rockville, Maryland. With the firm since 1984, he currently leads and supports his colleagues as they serve a diverse clientele by discovering, preserving, and presenting the past.
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- The Oxford Handbook of Public History
- Dedication
- List of Contributors
- The Past and Future of Public History: Developments and Challenges
- Internationalizing Public History
- Complexity and Collaboration: Doing Public History in Digital Environments
- Decentralizing Culture: Public History and Communities
- Trading Zones: Collaborative Ventures in Disability History
- Popular Understandings of the Past: Interpreting History through Graphic Novels
- The Business of History: Customers, Professionals, and Money
- Public Histories for Human Rights: Sites of Conscience and the Guantánamo Public Memory Project
- Archives for Justice, Archives of Justice
- Sexuality and the Cities: Interdisciplinarity and the Politics of Queer Public History
- Public History and the Environment
- From Environmental Liability to Community Asset: Public History, Communities, and Environmental Reclamation
- Between Pastness and Presentism: Public History and Local Food Activism
- Historians and Public History in the UN System
- Good Enough for Government Work
- Shaping Institutional Memory: Public History on Capitol Hill
- History, Heritage, and the Representation of Ethnic Diversity: Cultural Tourism in China
- Public History, Cultural Institutions, and National Identity: Dialogues about Difference
- History Museums and Identity: Finding “Them,” “Me,” and “Us” in the Gallery
- National Museums, National Narratives, and Identity Politics
- The Personalization of Loss in Memorial Museums
- The Magna Carta: 800 Years of Public History
- Public History as a Social Form of Knowledge
- Brownfield Public History: Arts and Heritage in the Aftermath of Deindustrialization
- Politics and Memory: How Germans Face Their Past
- The Legacy of Collecting: Colonial Collecting in the Belgian Congo and the Duty of Unveiling Provenance
- Slavery Tourism: Representing a Difficult History in Ghana
- How You Understand Your Story: The Survival Story within Cambodian American Genocide Communities
- In the Service of the State: Monuments and Memorials in Indonesia
- Index
