A variety of social and political tensions have historically shaped the interconnections between sexuality and public history, including the display of sexually explicit materials for the general public, concerns about censorship and the role of institutional funders, and debates about the role of mainstream institutions to document the history of communities long targeted by the guardians of official memory. Some aspects of sexuality, such as marriage, have long been part of public history, while others, such as sex work, have only rarely been mentioned. LGBTQ+ history has been particularly controversial, so this chapter focuses primarily on LGBTQ+ sexualities in public history, including organizations, archives, museums, publications, exhibitions, grassroots history projects, digital media, and other venues.

The conclusion to this book looks at the public afterlives of lynching objects as they move from personal collections into archives and museums. Through a study of several visual and material collections from lynchings, the chapter makes a claim for the persistence of lynching's material culture as part of an evolving historical conciousness. Further, this conclusion serves as a blueprint for a rethinking of the public historical interpretation of racial violence and of the rethinking of the entanglements between cultural heritage and racial violence.

This concluding chapter argues that current ideas about post-narrativism and post-representationalism still build on narrativism and representationalism rather than rejecting them. They do so in particular in their radical move away from grand narratives that are associated with the construction of collective identities. Yet, as the previous chapters have shown, this position can go hand in hand with maintaining that historical writing can and should amount to an intervention in the social world and that it is meaningful for directing and informing a variety of democratic policy agendas. It is historical writing that keeps the future open and makes us suspicious of all attempts to declare an end to history. The ‘new’ histories that have been emerging over recent decades and which have been the subject of analysis in this book often see identification in the definition by Stuart Hall as the basis for their social intervention. They contributed to a growing self-reflexivity about the relationship of historical writing and collective identity formation and they have often taken their starting point from a body of highly diverse theories that have been discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume. The chapter recaps the arguments of the previous eleven chapters of the book and finishes with a reflection on how the struggle over and with history will continue in the future. Denying the existence of any whiggish progressivism, it charts the well-known fact that professional historians’ greater reluctance to commit to the construction of essentialised collective identities has gone hand in hand with the willingness of ‘amateur historiansߣ to do precisely that. This in turn has made it increasingly necessary for professional historians not to retreat to their ivory towers but engage with all essentialised forms of identity history. They need to become engaged and public historians who continue an ongoing struggle over the past in all human societies.

Our contemporary moment sees a new impetus toward commemoration, fueled by the government-sponsored “Decade of Centenaries” program, spanning the years 1912–1922, from the centenary of the Ulster Covenant to the Irish Civil War. From the diverse cultural initiatives that have resulted to date, an imperative to expose and question what is memorialized, or what has been allowed to be of public matter, is already proving to be the most powerful feature of this commemorative decade. What has also become evident is the importance of new technologies and new modes of communication that look backward and forward: They invite new ways of thinking about the past that are already proving to be transformative in the present. Central to these activities is the development of new audiences and networks for the reception of Irish culture and, as this chapter also demonstrates, many offer the individual artist and their works a newly invigorated public role.