Classroom, Research, and Public History: An Integrated Approach

Abstract

AT A TIME when popular interest in history appears to be high, the historical enterprise seems unnecessarily fragmented. Classroom teachers, public agency officials, and research scholars-with their specialized functions in teaching, public programming, and research-have too little interaction with each other. This lack of vital integration results in part from the tendency to separate teaching from research, the classroom from the local context, and academic from local history. In too many cases it has led to scholarship with little connection either to the classroom or to the public, classroom learning that students find unrelated to their experience, and public programming isolated from an academic research and teaching base. One resolution to this impasse may be an approach which uses research methods from the new social his- tory, combining a statistical data base with a variety of other documentary sources to make the classroom a living history laboratory and the local historical agency or museum an integral constituent in the educational process