Lara Leigh Kelland. Clio’s Foot Soldiers

Lara Leigh Kelland begins Clio’s Foot Soldiers: Twentieth-Century U.S. Social Movements and Collective Memory by describing the project’s genesis with a desire to counter the oft-repeated origin story of the field of public history. In the 1970s, inspired by new social history and faced with decreasing job openings, a coterie of newly minted academics had turned their attention outward, finding employment in various history institutions and in the process making the history done outside of academic contexts more rigorous and scholarly. This may be part of the story of academic programs in public history, but not of public history practice, which has a longer, more robust history that intertwines at various times and in various ways with other disciplines, other institutions, and other movements. With this book, Kelland joins a growing cadre of scholars who are working to account more fully for this history. The aptly titled Clio’s Foot Soldiers is not only a book about where public history comes from; it is a book about who should be counted as a historian and above all why history matters.

Art · Collective memory · Economic history · Foot (prosody) · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Popular history · Public history · Social history (medicine) · Sociology · Classics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies