Introduction: Understanding Diverse Uses of Painful Pasts. A Plea for Conscious Normativity

Abstract

The three case studies of this special section address an issue that is undoubtedly at the core of the ethics of Public History: the quest to democratize history. They approach a problem that has concerned Public History from its very beginnings in the 1970s when, inspired by social and political activism such as the civil rights movement or the student protests of the 1960s in the United States, public historians started to rethink the way historical knowledge is created.This critical reflection referred to three central points that are still relevant today