Public History, Memory & Heritage: Who Owns the Past

On 7 June 2020, in Bristol, a crowd pulled down the bronze statue of Edward Colston, a merchant and philanthropist of the late seventeenth century whose firm shipped enslaved Africans, and rolled it into the harbour. The council fished it out four days later. In June 2021 it went on show in a city museum, lying on its back, graffiti intact, among protest placards. In January 2022 a jury acquitted four people charged with criminal damage.

Every part of that story is a historical argument. Was the statue evidence of what the city once honoured, or an honour still being paid? Does a museum preserve it or neutralise it? Should the crowd, a court or a council decide? Historians of Bristol knew the facts of Colston's life for decades. What changed was the public's relationship to them. That is the territory of public history: the past as it is used, taught, shown and fought over outside universities.

History, memory and heritage are three different things

The same past is held in three ways, and mixing them up causes most arguments. History is a disciplined account built from evidence, open to correction (see Historical Method & Sources, 35/84). Memory is what a living group carries about its own past, passed on in stories, rituals and anniversaries. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argued in the 1920s that memory is always collective, shaped by the groups we belong to; he died in Buchenwald in 1945. Pierre Nora's seven-volume Lieux de mémoire (1984–92) studied the "sites of memory" through which France remembered itself. Jan Assmann added a distinction: communicative memory, shared by living generations and fading after roughly eighty to a hundred years, and cultural memory, fixed in texts, monuments and rituals that outlast the people who lived it.

Heritage is the past selected and packaged for present use: the restored castle, the listed old town, the national day. David Lowenthal, in The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1998), argued that heritage differs from history because it clarifies the past to give it present purposes, rather than testing it. That is neither good nor bad. It is why heritage can bind a community and why it can mislead. Not everyone accepts the contrast; some scholars argue that all history is shaped by present concerns.

Without JavaScript: the article with footnotes and the radiocarbon report are history; the family ceremony, the survivors’ testimony and the mayor’s founding speech are memory; the costumed castle, the World Heritage listing and the proud-chapters trail are heritage.

Museums: who collects, who is shown, for whom

The museum is a recent invention. The British Museum was founded by Act of Parliament in 1753, from the collections of the physician Hans Sloane, and opened to the public in 1759. The Louvre became a public museum in 1793 in revolutionary France. Many great collections grew in the same centuries as European empires, and parts of them came from conquest, excavation under colonial rule, purchase on unequal terms and gifts. Alongside them, other museums were built to tell a nation's story from the inside: the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City (opened 1964) set the Indigenous past at the centre of the national one, though some critics say it presents living Indigenous peoples as part of the past. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in Washington in 2016. The District Six Museum in Cape Town (1994) and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago (2010) are community and state memorials to recent violence.

The profession is arguing about its own definition. In August 2022 the International Council of Museums, meeting in Prague, adopted a new one: a museum is a permanent, not-for-profit institution in the service of society, and the new text added that museums should operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities. The previous definition dated from 2007. A 2019 proposal using words such as "democratising" and "polyphonic" was postponed at the Kyoto conference after fierce argument, and the Prague text followed three years later. The debate was about whether museums should be neutral guardians or active participants in social questions. Defenders of neutrality say a museum that takes sides loses public trust; defenders of engagement say neutrality is itself a stance, usually of the people who built the museum.

Other sites are not museums at all. UNESCO's World Heritage Convention (1972) lists places of "outstanding universal value". The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp (listed 1979), Robben Island (1999) and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (1996) are sites of conscience whose preservation is itself a statement. Hiroshima's listing was welcomed by Japan and questioned by the United States and China.

Monuments: keep, explain, move or remove

A statue is not a history lesson; it is an honour, paid by one generation and inherited by the next. That is why it is contested when values change. Cities have done almost everything with such monuments. In Cape Town in 2015 students campaigning as "Rhodes Must Fall" got the University of Cape Town to remove its Cecil Rhodes statue (April 2015). In Richmond, Virginia, the large monument to Robert E. Lee was taken down in September 2021 after years of litigation. In 2003 US forces and Iraqis pulled down Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square (9 April), an image broadcast worldwide and later argued over for how staged it was. In Ukraine, the "decommunisation" laws of 2015 prompted the removal of Soviet statues. Budapest chose another route in 1993: Memento Park, outside the city, where communist-era statues stand together, taken from their old plinths. Oxford's Oriel College decided in 2021 not to remove its Rhodes statue, citing cost, planning rules and likely legal challenge, a decision criticised by campaigners.

Destruction is not only political reform. The Taliban dynamited the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001, and Islamic State fighters destroyed temples in Palmyra in 2015. Those acts show why heritage matters: people destroy what they know others hold dear.

Artists have invented another answer, the counter-monument. In 1986 Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz installed a twelve-metre lead column in Hamburg-Harburg, inscribed by passers-by, and lowered it into the ground a stage at a time until it vanished in 1993. The memorial made the viewers do the remembering. Below is an invented case, with no right answer marked.

Without JavaScript: the options are keep as it is, add context, move to a museum, remove and store, replace, or add a counter-monument. Each has a best case and a strongest objection, and each has been tried somewhere.

Restitution: whose is it, and where should it live?

Restitution means returning cultural objects to the people or places they came from. Two cases carry most of the argument.

The Benin Bronzes. In 1897 a British force took Benin City, capital of the Kingdom of Benin in what is now Nigeria, and removed royal brass, bronze and ivory works. Estimates of the numbers are uncertain: from three to five thousand pieces to as many as ten thousand objects in all. The British Museum holds about nine hundred. Museums in Germany, the United States and elsewhere hold many more. In July 2022 Germany signed a declaration to return its Benin holdings, announcing transfer of ownership of about 1,100 objects, and the first group of twenty was handed over in Abuja on 20 December 2022. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art transferred ownership of twenty-nine bronzes in October 2022. Then the question changed from whether to to whom: in March 2023 Nigeria's outgoing president decreed that returned objects belong to the Oba of Benin's royal family, which was welcomed in Benin City and criticised by others, including those who wanted a public museum to hold them. (Do not confuse the Kingdom of Benin, in today's Nigeria, with the Republic of Benin next door. In 2021 France returned twenty-six objects looted from the kingdom of Dahomey, which are part of the Republic of Benin's history.)

The Parthenon marbles. Between 1801 and 1812 Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, took sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens. He said an Ottoman permit (a firman) allowed it; no original of the document has been found in the Turkish archives, and scholars argue about what it covered. Parliament bought the collection for £35,000 in 1816 and gave it to the British Museum. About seventy-five metres of the frieze are in London; the rest is in Athens, much of it in the Acropolis Museum, opened in 2009. Greece has asked since the nineteenth century, and made a formal request for all the Acropolis sculptures in 1983. The British Museum cites the legal purchase, the 1963 British Museum Act that limits its ability to dispose of objects, and the argument that a "universal museum" lets people everywhere see the work in a world context, as set out in a 2002 declaration by major museums. Greece argues that the sculptures are parts of one monument that was cut up, and should be seen together at the site. In 2021 UNESCO's intergovernmental committee on return of cultural property recommended that the UK return them; the UK did not accept.

Beyond the two cases, there is law, politics and varied practice: the UNESCO convention against illicit trade (1970), US legislation for the return of Native American remains and sacred objects (NAGPRA, 1990), France's 2017 turn after President Macron's speech in Ouagadougou and the Sarr-Savoy report (2018), and increasing use of long loans, shared custody and digital access as middle routes.

Without JavaScript: facts like “taken in a military expedition” or “used by a living community” feed the claimant’s case; “bought in a recorded sale” or “legally barred from disposal” feed the holder’s; “fragile” and “split between places” feed both sides in different ways.

Truth commissions: telling the record after violence

After dictatorships and civil wars, societies face a hard choice about the past: prosecute, forgive, forget or document. A truth commission, in the definition scholar Priscilla Hayner uses, is an official, temporary body set up to investigate a pattern of past abuses over a period and to report publicly. It does not convict anyone. Argentina's CONADEP (set up in December 1983) published Nunca Más in September 1984; its documentation of about 9,000 cases fed the 1985 Trial of the Juntas, though human-rights groups put the number of the disappeared at 30,000. The later "Full Stop" and "Due Obedience" laws of 1986–87 limited prosecutions, and they were annulled in 2003–05. Truth and trials, in that case, were not alternatives but a sequence.

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, created by a 1995 Act and hearing witnesses from 1996, could grant amnesty to individuals who made full disclosure of politically motivated crimes. About 7,100 people applied and 849 were granted amnesty. Supporters say it made a peaceful transition possible and brought the details of apartheid-era violence into public view. Critics, including the family of Steve Biko, objected to amnesty without trial; others argued its mandate on gross violations left out the everyday system of apartheid, such as forced removals and pass laws.

Without JavaScript: Argentina 1984, about 9,000 cases documented; Chile 1991 and 2004, about 2,300 deaths and disappearances and about 28,000 survivors of imprisonment and torture; South Africa 1998, 849 amnesties; Guatemala 1999, over 200,000 killed or disappeared; Peru 2003, about 69,000 estimated; Canada 2015, 94 Calls to Action.

Memory laws: when the state writes the past into statute

Some states go further and legislate. The laws are of different kinds. Some ban the denial of a specific crime; some declare a historical judgement; some set up commemoration or exhumation; some punish speech the state regards as defaming the nation. Here is a small sample, with dates.

Place	What the law does
Germany	Criminal Code §130 punishes public denial or trivialisation of the Nazi genocide; part of the post-war settlement.
France	The Gayssot Act (1990) made contesting crimes against humanity as defined at Nuremberg an offence. The Taubira Act (2001) recognised the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity. A 2005 law told teachers to recognise the "positive role" of colonisation; the clause was withdrawn in 2006 after historians protested. In 2012 the Constitutional Council struck down a bill to punish denial of recognised genocides.
Spain	Law 52/2007 on "historical memory" and Law 20/2022 on "democratic memory" support exhumations from Civil War graves and annul Franco-era sentences. Franco's remains were moved from the Valley of the Fallen in October 2019. Supporters speak of victims' rights; opponents say it reopens a settled pact.
Poland	A 2018 amendment to the Institute of National Remembrance Act criminalised attributing Nazi crimes to the Polish nation; after protest it was changed in June 2018 to remove criminal penalties.
Russia	A 2014 criminal provision on "rehabilitation of Nazism" covers spreading "knowingly false" information about the Soviet Union in the Second World War; critics say the wording limits historians. See A Brief History of Russia (32/14).
Turkey	Article 301 of the Penal Code (2005, amended 2008) has been used against writers who discussed the Armenian killings, including Orhan Pamuk and, earlier, the journalist Hrant Dink.

The arguments. Defenders say a denial law protects the dignity of victims and their descendants, and in societies where denial is a continuation of the persecution, it is a safeguard. Critics say the state has no business deciding historical truth, that a law may chill research, and that the tool is easily taken up by governments with less honourable aims. In 2005 a group of French historians led by Pierre Nora launched Liberté pour l'histoire to press that last point. The European Court of Human Rights has treated the cases separately: in Perinçek v. Switzerland (Grand Chamber, 2015) it found that convicting a Turkish politician for calling the Armenian genocide an "international lie" breached freedom of expression, while its case law accepts restrictions on Holocaust denial because of its context and history.

Living disputes such as the recognition of the Armenian genocide are not settled here. Genocide scholars' association resolutions describe the 1915 events as genocide; the Turkish state rejects that word and describes a wartime tragedy with losses on several sides. Read both accounts, and the library's national histories for context.

What a graduate just sees

• History, memory and heritage are three ways of holding the past; ask which one an item is.
• A monument tells you what a past generation chose to honour, which is a fact, even if the honour is now disputed.
• Every museum has an author, a founding story and a theory of what the public needs.
• Restitution has two questions: should it move, and to whom? The second can be harder than the first.
• A truth commission offers a record, not a verdict; whether trials follow is a separate choice.
• When a state legislates about the past, ask what it protects and what it risks.
• Empirical questions ("what happened?") and normative questions ("what should we do about it?") need different evidence. Do not let one slip in as the other.

Where it shows up next

• International Law and Human Rights (35/10): the 1970 UNESCO convention, genocide and crimes against humanity, and what international courts can decide.
• Reporting & Interviewing (35/92): journalists are public historians, and every anniversary story picks a version.
• Political Theory (35/12): justice, reparation and legitimacy; which of these claims a state can ever repay.
• In the world: curators, archivists, heritage officers, foundations, legal advisers, and every town council that has voted on a plaque.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice (Routledge, 2nd edition 2022), and Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths (Routledge, 2nd edition 2011) for truth commissions.
• 📘 Gentler. Neil MacGregor, Germany: Memories of a Nation (2014), and David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985). On restitution, read both Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums (2020) and Tiffany Jenkins, Keeping Their Marbles (2016); they disagree, and that is the point.
• 🌐 Free text. The National Council on Public History publishes introductions to the field, and the Internet History Sourcebooks Project has primary texts.
• 🌐 Free course. I could not confirm a free open course dedicated to this subject; for the theory behind it, the MIT OpenCourseWare 21H.991 Theories and Methods in the Study of History syllabus (Fall 2010) lists readings on memory and historiography.