Amid a national reckoning with the origins of the nation’s founding and the United States’ legacy of slavery and racial violence, history has re-emerged as a central facet of our public discourse in recent years. The efforts of historians, museum professionals, teachers, journalists, politicians, and members of the public to influence our understanding of how history can and should inform the present have revealed stark differences in Americans’ perceptions of history and of the nation’s past.

Yet until recently, we’ve known surprisingly little about Americans’ engagement with history. How do different segments of the public understand what history is and why it’s valuable to society? When, where, and why do Americans interact with history in all its various forms? What do Americans’ perceptions of the past tell us about divisions in American society today or opportunities to build on common ground? This panel will feature insights from two new research projects addressing those questions—the American Historical Association’s (AHA) “History, the Past, and Public Culture” survey and the American Association for State and Local History’s (AASLH) “Framing History with the American Public” project—as a foundation for a wider ranging conversation about how historians and public history professionals engage with public audiences now, and how those approaches might change in the future.

The AHA’s “History, the Past, and Public Culture” project (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities) involved a national survey of the American public to assess their perceptions of, and engagement with, history and the past, building on Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s groundbreaking The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. AASLH’s “Framing History with the American Public” project (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) investigated the gaps between professional and public understandings of history and empirically tested new framing strategies to help historians communicate more effectively.

Taken together, both projects hold major implications for scholarly and public history practice, from generating public support for history institutions, to recruiting new history majors, to reaching the widest possible audiences with relevant and engaging historical content. In the panel, Dana Schaffer (AHA) and John Dichtl (AASLH) will present the findings of their respective projects. Estevan Rael-Gálvez (Independent Consultant) and Mary Elliott (Smithsonian National Museum of American History and Culture) will interpret the findings of the two projects and discuss their implications for historians’ work in professions across the discipline and for how historians engage with public audiences. Katharina Matro (Stone Ridge School) will serve as moderator and chair for a brief discussion among panelists prior to a full Q&A with the audience.

By bringing new research to bear on pressing questions about where, how, and why the public engages with history and the past, this session will provide scholars, public history professionals, teachers, and other history advocates with new ideas and resources to aid their efforts to connect with the public.