This article examines Filipino memories of the Asia-Pacific War. In particular, it investigates which survivor accounts developed into the dominant historical narrative as well as looks at how prisoner of war monuments on Camp O'Donnell have been influenced by political and economic developments after the Asia-Pacific War. This study also re-examines how these shared memories about Camp O'Donnell complemented each other and became part of the canonical wartime narrative in Philippine history. This article uses “politics of mourning” as a framework in analyzing key events that led to both the development of canonical narratives in the construction of public history as embodied in the monuments and shrines in the present-day Capas National Shrine.

This Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus special issue on “The Comfort Women as Public History” concludes with documentary filmmaker Miki Dezaki in conversation with Edward Vickers and Mark R. Frost. Dezaki's film Shusenjo, released in 2018, examines the controversy over “comfort women” within Japan, as well as its implications for Korea-Japan relations. Dezaki, himself Japanese-American, also devotes considerable attention to the growing ramifications of this controversy within the United States, as an instance of the increasing international significance of the comfort women issue. In this discussion, he, Frost and Vickers reflect on the messages of the film, the experience of making and distributing it, and what this reveals about the difficulty - and importance - of doing public history in a manner that respects the complexity of the past.

In this introductory essay to the special issue of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on “The Comfort Women as Public History,” we analyze the turn since the early 2000s towards “heritagization” of this controversial issue. After reviewing the political, cultural and historiographical background to ongoing disputes over “comfort women,” we examine how the reframing of this issue as “heritage” has been accompanied by increasing entanglement with the global politics of atrocity commemoration, and associated tropes. Prominent among such tropes is the claim that commemoration fosters “peace”. However, following recent critical scholarship on this issue, and drawing on the papers that comprise this special issue, we question any necessary equation between heritagization and reconciliation. When done badly, the drive to commemorate a contentious issue as public history can exacerbate rather than resolve division and hatred. We therefore emphasise the need for representation of comfort women as public history to pay due regard to nuance and complexity, for example regarding the depiction of victims versus perpetrators; the transnational dimension of the system; and its relationship with the broader history of gender politics and the sexual subjugation of women.

Calls for reparations and apologies for crimes committed during the 1930s/40s war in Asia have been major points of contention in East Asia's public memory since at least the 1980s. In recent years, a “history/memory war” over the “comfort women” issue has intensified. At the same time, the battleground has also shifted to the terrain of “heritage” and has increasingly taken on a global dimension. This paper considers an increasingly significant arena for East Asian memory wars, involving diaspora communities in Western countries. Its particular focus is the coordinated “comfort women” activism of Korean American and other Asian American diaspora groups in certain regions of the United States. While their decades-long activism has produced a ‘memory boom’ in its own right and resulted in raising the political profile of Asian Americans, I argue that this has also come at the cost of straining to breaking point post-war arrangements for symbolizing and cementing US-Japanese reconciliation. The paper builds on existing research to delineate the expanding scope of Asia's memory wars and introduces new insights into some of the US activists' inter-ethnic alliance building that underscores the increasingly global nature of these memory conflicts as well as the potentially lasting repercussions for societies far beyond East Asia.

In this article, I explore how public participation affects the research and production of history. As a way of making history more accessible, more participatory, and more connected to present-day public engagement with the past, public history fully belongs to the public humanities. In public participation as decentralization of the history-making process: the HistorEsch project in Luxembourg, I discuss the collaboration among historians, artists, and local residents to co-construct new public historical narratives of the town of Esch-sur-Alzette, in Luxembourg. As a paradigm, public history questions and reinvents the role of professional historians who share authority with other actors in the history-making process.

This essay will discuss the issue of Native American history and periodization where we are not allowed “premodern” histories. History prior to European contact is relegated to terms like “Pre-Columbian” and consigned to the domain of archeologists. As a reclamation of Native sovereign ancestral presence, I am interested in public humanities as an interdisciplinary way to push against the myths and stereotypes that both confine Indigenous people to static pasts, either displacing ancestors into settler national memory or oblivion. My goals in public humanities are to work toward reclamations of ancient pasts in the so-called Americas from the limited imaginations of settler skull- and arrowhead-collectors toward reasserting the ongoing lived relationships that Natives have with spaces condemned as ruins and materials as relics. I briefly mention my own work in digital curation, Red Coral Stories, to provide counternarratives from European conquest toward expanding Native American presence across space and time.

Stuart Hall stated “the university is a critical institution or it is nothing.” When it comes to the historical study of sexual abuse in Canadian sport, until very recently, it has been very much the latter. Nothing. As part of a larger project on studies of sexual abuse in sport, we reviewed articles across the four leading sport history journals – Sport History Review, Sport in History, Journal of Sport History, and International Journal of the History of Sport – to consider what methods, sports, and demographics received the most analysis. Such an effort proved impossible. There was scholarly silence on the matter. But this raised another question. So what? Would publishing in pay-walled academic journals about so pressing a societal issue make any difference at all? Furthermore, can a PhD-touting academic – including the lead author of this paper – ever enact change via the field of history if their sole purpose is to churn out studies for the ivory tower? We think not. It requires boots on the ground. Engagement and collaboration with those Antonio Gramsci called “organic intellectuals,” so we can tend the flames of knowledge and fuel a movement. History can be the tool one wields. Public, digital history.

Museums and news organizations make up major parts of the structure that maintains an informed community essential to democracy. As resources for both of these institutions dwindle, it’s more important than ever for these sectors to work together toward their common goals – not only with each other, but with their respective communities in ways that are collaborative and egalitarian. The following outlines Civil Wrongs, a program started at the University of Memphis Department of Journalism and Strategic Media in 2022, as an emerging example of how these institutions can work together and learn from each other for the sake of a more informed community. Civil Wrongs is both a journalistic project of the nonprofit Institute for Public Service Reporting, and an academic class for junior and senior college students from multiple disciplines, including journalism, history, and political science. Through narrative podcasting, the program aims to examine past cases of racial terror in the Mid-South and analyze their connection to present-day injustices. It is a break from the traditional journalistic model that focuses solely on the present with little historical context and therefore naturally creates a bridge to museums that are grounded in history education.

The public history movement in North America that was born amid the academic job crisis of the late 1970s aspired to a radical reformation of professional history’s audience from an inward focused conversation among professionals to one working with government and corporate institutions and in dialogue with the public. This essay focuses on the institutional evolution of the National Council on Public History (NCPH) to illustrate the unexpected, but not entirely unpropitious outcome that flowed from the failure of the organization’s original goals. How that movement failed and what it succeeded in creating may hold useful lessons for the contemporary public humanities campaign. In the late twentieth century, the public history movement failed to bring about a major reorientation of professional and academic history. In the attempt, however, it created an off shot of public history as one of a number of new but distinctly separate fields of academic historical practice. Unexpectedly, public history became a new academic specialty alongside other new fields from that era: native American history, environmental history, and gender history.

Bamako, March 1991. 100,000 protesters took to the street challenging Mali's military regime. Both men and women participated in six months of protests, their actions shaped by class, gender, and generation. The press, in its reporting, produced a specific, gendered, image of protest, involving young men protesters and their exceptional mères indociles (rebellious mothers) motivated to protest by the risk of bodily harm to their children.1

Portraits and biographies play a central role in engaging non-specialists with the past, and hence invite careful scrutiny. Major enterprises, such as the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Dictionary of National Biography, in both its original and Oxford versions, provide rich examples for reflecting on public history and on the relationships between types of writing about past times. These issues relate to literature as well as to history, given the prominence of biographies of literary figures, and the role of literary scholars as authors of biographies. Using materials concerning the artist John Collier (1850–1934), the publisher George Smith (1824–1901) and the surgeon James Paget (1814–1899), this article examines the relationships between portraits and biographies and the types of insight they afford. Colin Matthew's innovation of including portraits in the Oxford Dictionary, together with his own scholarship on William Gladstone (1809–1898), including his portraits, provide the basis for suggestions about the role of work when representing lives, including those of historians. Public history can only benefit from research practices being discussed in an accessible manner, as attempted here.