ethics and public history

Public history, as a relatively new field, means that the ethical codes written for them are also relatively new. While I read through the codes of conduct for the SAA, NCPH, AAM, and OAH, I was also curious about what the American Historical Society had to say about ethics. I perused the code, focusing primarily on the Public Realm section. From my experience in the public history class, I thought that the AHS would be ultimately a little apprehensive to accept public historians as worthwhile to the field of history, but from their website, it seems that this is not so. Perhaps the scholars involved in the AHS are apprehensive of public history as a field, but I think that ultimately, being a part of the field of history requires general respect.

From AHS Public Realm:

 "for when historians communicate with a wider public, they must represent not just a particular interpretation or body of facts, but the best practices of the discipline of history itself. This means they must inevitably walk a tightrope in balancing their desire to present a particular point of view with their responsibility to uphold the standards and values that underpin their professional authority as historians." 

The main point of this excerpt is to display that public historians walk a fine line ethically. As we have learned, part of public history is social activism, at least to some degree. Presenting and interpreting information in the public sphere is a different game than writing a monograph. You can't close your office door to the public as a public historian.

The codes of ethics from the organizations that we looked at were generally related. They differed in the specifics, as is expected because the organizations have different objectives. The NCPH lays out what the ideal public historian will uphold, ethically and the job of the public historian. The SAA Code of Ethics focuses on professional relationships, judgement, authenticity, security and protection, access and use, privacy, trust. The code of ethics for museums focuses on the display, preparation, collections, and governance of those museums. For the Oral History code, more focus is on the process of interviewing because interviewees are living human beings. Oral History involves consent, old material does not. Interviewees are of equal authority as interviewers. Oral History Ethics gives specific outlines of how to go about following the ethical rules. Other codes do not give such suggestions, just relatively vague outlines.

Overall, I think the individual codes were pretty similar in their objectives. The main issues raised in the articles and in the ethics codes are those of representation and respect as well as professionalism and public interest. For a public historian, it is important to represent history in an accurate, but interesting and thought-provoking way.