The Many Publics in Public History

Author: Prithi Kanakamedala, Bronx Community College, CUNY

Since 2010, I have been the steward of a public history project that has had many names: In Pursuit of Freedom (2010–present), Brooklyn Abolitionists (2012–19), Color between the Lines (2012), and, in its most recent iteration, Brooklynites (NYU Press, September 2024). Each of these iterations, or life cycles, has also invited many publics to its narrative—museum visitors, K–12 school groups in New York City, tourists, theater audiences, college students, faculty members, and the catch-all term we call everyone else: the general public. But, at its center, the pulse of this research and its commitment to the “why”—Why is this research important? What is the urgency for it to exist? Why must it intentionally be for the many publics?—have remained the same. Brooklyn, New York, has a distinct story to tell in the history of social justice. And this story deserves bold dissemination. Its history explains so much of how we got here, how legacies of colonial violence and dispossession, slavery, and racial capitalism have led us to our present moment. And why Brooklyn? Because it was not always one of New York City’s five boroughs. That would not come until consolidation in 1898. Instead, it was an independent city in its own right, and the third-largest city in the United States on the eve of the Civil War. Brooklyn and its history therefore merit their own unpacking.

This essay examines the long organic life of a public-facing, community-engaged project, involving its many iterations; sources of funding—including the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship, which entered the project’s life cycle at a pivotal and crucial time; and, of course, the project’s process and its publics. For just under a decade and a half, I have worked on the history of Brooklyn’s nineteenth-century free Black community as an invitation to think about the long arc of social justice, and to acknowledge the debt we owe to New Yorkers past. Part of the slowness of that decade and a half has been connected to a lack of resources and funding that allows community college faculty members to be out of the classroom and in archives, in writing groups, and in talks with the public that might spark new thematic areas within the historical narrative. But, at its core, the narrative is about how we make life and create community, and that idea has been used in the last fourteen years to create community and dialogue with many publics in the present.

Life Cycle 1: Public History through Cultural Institutions

In April 2010, I began my first “real” job post-PhD. I was still a relatively newer immigrant to the United States, and, as for most folx coming out of doctoral programs (mine was from the University of Sussex in Britain), the crisis in higher education and job placement had already begun. Simply put, there were not enough jobs for all of us. Luckily, academia had not been my plan A (yes, I realize the irony of writing this as a tenured full professor today at the City University of New York). The job was to serve in a two-year grant-funded position as project historian for a public history project called In Pursuit of Freedom, which saw three major cultural institutions in Brooklyn partner together. They were the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS, now the Center for Brooklyn History at Brooklyn Public Library), Weeksville Heritage Center, and Irondale Ensemble Project. For the first year, the work was done in the community; as the historian, I collaborated with colleagues in museum archives, education, development, and design and with a team of brilliant part-time researchers whom I mentored as we dug into the archives to put together the undertold narrative of Brooklyn’s free Black communities and the city they made. The research was completed in record time. Historical research, particularly where original archival research is involved, is notoriously slow. It is one of the joys of the historian’s craft—being able to recover and piece together the lives of people past from the archives across various repositories in a manner that is deliberately slow and methodical, so that nothing is missed, the interpretation is thoughtful and nuanced, and the conveyance of the past is told in all of its complexity. That slowness, however, is the antithesis to the pace of the public humanities, which is often in a race against time (delivering the deliverables) and funding (to complete the project before the money runs out). What was lost in that iteration was a more nuanced view of the past and a thoughtful engagement with the nature of nineteenth-century archives; to beat the funding clock, we privileged what a museum visitor can see when they enter the exhibit space rather than asking why we don’t we have any portraits of Black women who were at the center of historic organizing and using that as the starting point in our interpretative plan.

In the second year of In Pursuit of Freedom, the focus became the external publics—the audiences to whom this work was dedicated. Again in community, we created walking tours, a K–12 curriculum, an original theater production, and a content-rich website, and we began work on what would become the major exhibit Brooklyn Abolitionists at BHS. All of this, including my modest salary and benefits, was cobbled together through a variety of funders: New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Economic Development Corporation, the National Grid Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Community Trust, Verizon, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Bay and Paul Foundations, and the now-defunct U.S. Department of Education Underground Railroad Educational and Cultural Program. And, here, I learned a great deal about funding and the humanities—namely, that these major, public-facing projects, even when there are major donors on the funding list, very rarely translate to real wages for real people doing the work.

But the narrative “In Pursuit of Freedom” / “Brooklyn Abolitionists” was born.

Creating Community

From the end of the American Revolution to the start of the Civil War, Brooklyn underwent a radical transformation from one of six agricultural towns in Kings County, New York, to the third-largest city in the United States. As it did so, its free Black communities—ordinary people from all walks of life—did extraordinary things to shape their streets, neighborhoods, city, and country in a radical vision of democracy and justice. These communities did so against the backdrop of racial capitalism and white supremacy. Even after New York State, and therefore Brooklyn, marked the absolute abolition of slavery in 1827, free Black Brooklynites still faced innumerable challenges that tested their rights as fellow neighbors and Americans. When white entrepreneurs and businessmen recognized that Manhattan was overcrowded and expensive, they began to rapidly develop Brooklyn’s waterfront, which tied this place in New York’s post-emancipation period to slavery. One of its most enduring commodities is, perhaps, one of the country's most beloved: sugar. Domino Sugar was birthed in Brooklyn, and its neat yellow-and-white packaging still adorns the shelves of grocery stores today. Despite these odds, Brooklyn’s free Black communities organized, mobilized, and created community to agitate for justice in areas that still inform how we make life today: voting, employment, housing, education, and safety. This is not a parochial history; rather, its hyperlocal focus is one that speaks to multiple communities across the country today.

The research is intentional in its invitation to the many publics to consider how the past affects the present. Why is that important in a borough like Brooklyn, and a city like New York? Because past is present. In the city’s most populous borough, which has in recent decades experienced high levels of displacement and gentrification, a multitude of racial injustices, and a rapidly changing landscape, exploring how we got here is crucial to fostering dialogue as to how we make this world more just. But all of this has roots in Brooklyn’s slaveholding past. And where better to learn from the past than to focus on Brooklyn’s free Black communities, who held many of the same dreams, hopes, and aspirations for their city and country as we do today? There are lessons to be learned in these stories.

From 2014 to 2019, this was the basis of our conversations. During that time, BHS hosted 351 field trip programs, which served 7,763 kids and 1,112 adults (8,875 people total); fifty-one adult, college, and senior tours, which served 891 people; professional conferences, teacher workshops, and the like, which served 421 teachers—all of which is likely an undercount. I spoke at public libraries, museums, a retirement home, churches, courts, schools, and a variety of professional development workshops aimed at K–12 educators in the New York City public school system.

The response from these varied audiences, cutting across age, gender, race, ethnicity, and class, was almost always the same: “Why do we not know this history?” or “Why is this history not taught in school?” or “Where can I buy your book?” and versions of these refrains.

Life Cycle 2: Public History in the Classroom

During this period, I also began a coveted full-time tenure-track faculty position in the history department at Bronx Community College (BCC), of the City University of New York (CUNY)—the largest urban university in the United States. This research became the bedrock of my pedagogical content and approach as an educator—What does it mean to be in community? These are crucial lessons in my classroom, where BCC students are gifted and nontraditional, and are also directly impacted by the very systems of harm that those free Black Brooklynites were mobilizing to address almost two centuries ago.

Like all typical New Yorkers, my students in the Bronx might never have visited Brooklyn in their own lifetimes or seen an obvious connection to the borough. And, like most community college students, many of them have a difficult, sometimes fraught relationship with the discipline of history, which they associate with the rote learning of time, place, and people to which they have no connection. To them, our classes are therefore a requirement to graduate and hold no initial deeper meaning. But, in teaching survey courses in US history, African American history, and the history of New York City in the last decade, I have found most students are deeply engaged and committed when they can see how past is present, how we can learn from our ancestors and New Yorkers past.

The lesson plan has not changed significantly in the last decade. I open with an invitation for students to respond to the question “What three things do you think of when I say ‘community’?” This often eases students into the conversation, so then I ask them, “How do we create community?” Inevitably, some students answer, “through a community center.” But, given the scarcity of these necessary sites in New York City in the last fifty years, I have over the years excluded this as an option. Our students dig deep into their own lived experiences, thinking about how their neighborhood came to be, what they love about it, what they would change about it. I have found they eventually land on the same core ideas about creating community—namely, that creating community requires a physical space in which people feel safe and free (in its multiple contexts), it requires hope and discipline to ensure its longevity, and it requires funding or fundraising to make it a reality.

As a result of that work, BCC students in my classes have been introduced to all methods of public history practice. We visit Central Park, the present site of what was once the thriving community of Seneca Village, a mixed free Black and Irish community that would be razed to create Manhattan’s now-celebrated public space. Students learn about the decades of public history research, work, and advocacy that was shepherded by public history colleagues so that there could be a place marker in the park today by which visitors can learn more about Seneca Village’s rich and violently erased history. If possible, we travel what seems to some students like impossibly long commutes on the subway to Brooklyn, where we visit Weeksville Heritage Center, the stewards of the legacy of Weeksville’s original nineteenth-century free Black community, where two of the original houses still stand. And, in these courses, students create walking tours, neighborhood guides, or digital projects about the history of a free Black community, in which they make connections to their own neighborhoods today and can bring in their own rich lived experiences.

Life Cycle 3: Public History through Publication

Although this essay considers the many publics that public history engages with, the current iteration of this work is perhaps the most traditional of all knowledge dissemination and not that radical at all: a full-length book published by a scholarly press. When I began as an assistant professor at BCC in fall 2014, our contract established a 5/4 teaching load—that is, twenty-seven contact hours. Today, that teaching load is 4/4, or twenty-four contact hours. I have heard audible gasps from audiences when I explain in public talks why a book on the topic of community is taking such a long time to write. There was simply no time. So I continued to lecture and speak wherever I was invited to do so on this history, and as long as the exhibit was up at BHS (it would come down in winter 2019), there was an easy way to redirect the many publics to a version of this work.

When the exhibit came down, however, there was a renewed sense that this historical research needed to be recorded. BCC has a long-standing culture of celebrating faculty-member achievements from grants, fellowships, and publications, but, like most underfunded and underserved institutions in US higher education, it also lacks the infrastructure and community (or people power) to fully support faculty members on the tenure track (or thereafter). My university’s story is that of many CUNY colleges. The resources that are available at one CUNY community college in terms of institutional knowledge or staffing within the grants office might not be the same at another.

Funding from the Mellon/ACLS fellowship made the book a reality. I was able to use the funds to buy course releases, which meant I was no longer in a classroom using the history of community making in nineteenth-century Brooklyn to create community, or doing service work for the college and university, or answering emails, but engaged with writing groups to open this historical narrative to new publics. It allowed me as a scholar to buy time against the tenure clock and capitalism’s clock and put me into the archives again so I could spend more time recovering the voices of Black women who had been at the center of community building in nineteenth-century Brooklyn. The emphasis was always on process—what was missed during the first public history iteration because of the pressure to install exhibits within a specified time frame—while delicately balancing that funders do need a deliverable as a measure of funding success. As a result of the Mellon/ACLS eighteen-month fellowship, I was able to draft three sample chapters and a book proposal. I was also able to redesign my survey course in African American history as a Black women’s history course that focused on nineteenth-century Brooklyn. A yearlong sabbatical then allowed me to draft the entire book when the publisher requested to see the entire piece; otherwise, the project would have been stuck at the sample chapter and book proposal phase. This also allowed me to apply for promotion from associate to full professor.

Today, the same research is forthcoming as a full-length book called Brooklynites in September 2024. And it feels incredibly special. Perhaps when you read this it’s already out. The publisher has prioritized it as the lead title for fall 2024, and I am excited for it to be in the hands of a “general” audience. It was important to me that the book have an affordable price point so that as many people as possible would not see it as a barrier to accessing this history, and NYU Press has been a great collaborator here, too. The book’s launch will be accompanied by a series of public programs—in conversation with writer Kaitlyn Greenidge on the craft of writing from archives, historian Dominique Jean-Louis on undertold historical narratives, librarian Natiba Guy-Clement on the silences of the archives, and artist and oral historian Walis Johnson on family and historical legacies. All of these are designed with public audiences in mind. Community remains at the center of the book. The book’s methodology intentionally rejects the “discovery” or “untold” model of historical research and instead recovers this undertold story. It owes a debt to scholars, community researchers, and residents who had long been doing this research on Brooklyn’s history when I was still a young person growing up in Liverpool, England. And it owes a lifetime of gratitude to audiences across public venues since the project’s inception, and to BCC students and their engagement in the classroom. I write in the book’s acknowledgments, “This book has taken a very long time to write. But at its heart it is about creating community, and it was community that made this book and project possible. And I cannot overstate how much I owe to BCC students over the years who have made me a better educator and historian. We have engaged in some of the most moving and meaningful discussions about what it means to create community when liberation is the end goal, and I hope to have done their contributions some justice here.”

I am excited for audiences to see the history of this borough and their city in print. It has taken fourteen long years, and the project has had multiple funders, who have sometimes had to fund the process (archival research, time to write) rather than the actual deliverable—an exhibit or a book. I am excited for audiences in other cities, and countries, to explore how ordinary people have shaped their city and the lessons we might learn from them. The theme of self-determination runs throughout the book, and it feels resonant for a wide range of communities to think about grassroots coalition building through hope and love. The pulse of the research remains the same—that ordinary New Yorkers achieved extraordinary things that shaped their city, that we are the recipients of their labor, and that we owe it to their legacy that this history always be disseminated in a publicly engaged way. As stated in the book’s acknowledgments, “It is a privilege to put one’s name on the front of this book when the research belongs to a village.” These are their stories—the research belongs to the many publics. This essay is an invitation to engage in further dialogue about how we rethink the grant-writing model of delivering the “deliverables” as a mode of project success and to think that the deliverable might actually be one of process—one that centers building trust with a variety of publics, which takes time—that can sustain a project through many life cycles.