My reply to Mary Rizzo’s Jon Stewart, public historian?, and especially Erik Greenberg’s comment:

Let’s think about a “big tent” definition of public historian. Limiting it to “someone grounded in the arguments, practices, and habits of mind of an academically trained historian” leaves out some of the best and most interesting work – and makes for a pretty boring field. It says, do history our way, the academic way, and then we’ll keep you in our club. What if we defined it to include community historians, enthusiastic amateurs, popular writers, genealogists? We academically trained historians might learn a lot – as well as reach a larger audience. If our goal is to encourage the public to use the past to think about the present and future – I think that’s a fair definition of the purpose of public history – then we want to include all (or at least most) of those folks that Mary RIzzo illustrates above. It’s about ends, not means, and certainly not about technique, practice, or (above all!) being able to write in a really boring way.