From the Frontline to the Picket Line: Public History and the Cultural Labor Revolution

Abstract

A dramatic wave of unionizing in the museum world over the past year has sparked new conversations about labor and collective organizing throughout the cultural sector. Yet while those at the forefront of these conversations hope to leverage this moment into a cohesive movement, cultural labor activism has manifested in different ways throughout the cultural sector. This thesis seeks to understand the specific role of public history within the recent movement, through interviews with staff members involved in organizing efforts at their museum/historic site and media coverage of both successful and failed union drives. The goal of this work is to bring together the many disparate threads of conversation surrounding cultural labor activism to highlight the specific ways that public historical work prevents social movements. This thesis will build upon an existing yet nascent scholarship on public historical labor to contextualize this moment in a way that will appeal to a broad cross section of cultural workers. This analysis also offers potential solutions to build on the momentum of this current cultural revolution, such as calling on professional organizations like the National Council of Public History to become a player in the fight for public history labor protections.