Public history projects are wholly dependent upon a shared authority between audience and content. Public history is an endeavor that is a shared process of history making. Although public history’s definition continues to be a work in progress, it can be redefined as a “society in which a broad public participates in the construction of its own history” (Grele, p.48). This shared process implies that public historians must work with communities to develop the content that will manifest into a public history project. In other words, public history projects belong just as much to the community as it does to the historian as they cannot exist without one another.

According to Frisch, shared authority can be offered as “the interaction of scholarly authority and wider public involvement in presentations of history” (p.53) and the process of doing history with the public can be complex but rewarding. Serge Noiret states “ a public historian confronts and integrates one’s own knowledge listening to public memories and incorporating community documents” (p.55). Co-creating history is dependent on dialogue driven approaches like collaborative reflection opportunities and interviews with members of the public. 

Projects like the Chinatown History Museum (CHM) Experiment demonstrate the usefulness of collaborative reflections. The Chinatown History Museum’s mission is to create dialogue-driven exhibitions in order to better explore the “memory and meaning of Chinatown’s past” (p.291). According to John Kuo Wei Tchen,  “target segments of the Chinese American community have been collaborating with the CHM planning group in documenting the history of Chinatown and reflecting upon their memories of it” (p.298). The project also involved scholars, museum professionals, and segments of the non-chinese community. As a result, CHM has created exhibitions that incorporate feedback from site visitors who are willing to discuss the themes and details of the exhibit and provide their own “memories, photographs, documents, and personal memorabilia” (p.308). 

Interviews are also an important part of public history. Oral Histories allow for individuals to share their personal experiences to past events and ownership is shared amongst the interviewer and interviewee” (Corbett and Miller, p.20). Projects like Through the Eyes of the Child utilized oral history interviews to bring to light local African American History. The goal of the project “was to share both inquiry and authority with the black community, beginning with focus group discussions to determine what kind of museum exhibit that community wanted to see” (p.29). From these discussions, community participants “firmly recommended against an exhibit on civil rights, music, or sports, all of which they regarded as stereotypical at best” (p. 29). Consequently, the final exhibit included “a one-act play and curriculum materials for neighborhood oral history projects, celebrated middle-class community values and reflected them from the museum back to the community” (p. 30). 

Without a doubt, public history projects require historians and the community to work together. The collaborations of both parties enable history to become more meaningful and worthwhile to the existing community. Dialogue driven collaborations between historians and the public allow for history to have a shared authority that promotes a shared process of history making.