Why Museum Visitor Numbers Rise and Fall: A Public History Perspective When the latest UK museum attendance headlines landed, they told a familiar story: the British Museum back at the top, Tate Modern drawing millions, and a flurry of regional…
What Is Public History? Public history is one of those phrases that sounds self-explanatory until you try to define it. Surely it just means history presented to the public — museums, plaques, documentaries, that sort of thing? That reading gets…
The Tea Act Explained: How a Tax on Tea Sparked a Revolution Why did a tax on tea – a drink enjoyed in drawing rooms and coffee houses on both sides of the Atlantic – become the spark that ignited…
The Future of Historic House Museums: A Public History Perspective Can historic house museums survive without radical change? It’s a question we found ourselves asking repeatedly during a recent visit to a National Trust property in the West Country, where…
Reading Museum Annual Reports: What They Reveal About Public History We have a confession to make: for years, we skipped over annual reports. They looked like the dullest documents in the heritage sector — pages of accounts, governance notes, and…
National Trust Houses and Difficult Histories: Confronting the Past in Britain’s Heritage Sites On a grey afternoon last autumn, we stood in the drawing room of a National Trust property and listened as a volunteer guide delivered a polished twenty-minute…
Living History: Education or Entertainment? The musket smoke has barely cleared when a visitor asks the redcoat whether he is scared of losing. For a moment, the man in the woollen coat stays in character, then breaks into a grin…
Colonial Williamsburg: Lessons for Heritage Sites Picture a coach party spilling out into a reconstructed 18th-century street, tickets in hand, costumed interpreters mid-argument about stamp taxes, and a queue forming outside a tavern that serves historically inspired pies. Now picture…
Careers in Public History: How to Build a Meaningful Career in Museums and Heritage We have lost count of the emails we receive from readers asking some version of the same question: how do you actually turn a love of…
Apps and Games at Heritage Sites: How Digital Play Is Reshaping Public History A family stands in the shadow of a ruined abbey in North Yorkshire. The walls are waist-high, the roof long gone, and the interpretation board is faded.…