1.What is “History from Below”?

Traditional historical writing has often followed a top-down approach, focusing primarily on major events involving kings, prime ministers, generals, and political elites. History from Below, by contrast, shifts the focus toward the everyday lives and experiences of ordinary people, marginalized groups, and communities at the grassroots level.

Core focus: The voices and experiences of ordinary people, including farmers, workers, women, ethnic minorities, migrants, and other groups whose perspectives have often been underrepresented in conventional historical narratives.

Central idea: History is not created solely by heroes, rulers, or political elites. Ordinary people at the grassroots level are also historical actors who contribute to and shape processes of social change.

Research approaches: Because people at the grassroots level have rarely left behind official documents or formal biographies, historians often have to reconstruct their lived experiences through folk stories, personal letters, factory records, court transcripts, and oral history These sources help bring to light dimensions of everyday life that may otherwise remain absent from official historical records.

2.What is “Public History”?

Traditional academic history has often been confined to universities, scholarly journals, archives, and other institutional settings, where historical knowledge is primarily discussed among scholars. Public History, by contrast, seeks to bring historical knowledge beyond the ivory tower and into the public sphere, creating meaningful connections between history and society at large.

Core focus: The practice and application of historical knowledge in contemporary society.

Common settings and forms: Museum exhibitions, the revitalization of historical sites and heritage spaces, documentary filmmaking, community-based historical tours, digital historical databases, and even the historical research and verification involved in films, television productions, and video games dealing with historical subjects.

Central idea: Historians are no longer regarded as the sole “authorities” or transmitters of historical knowledge Instead, they can serve as facilitators who encourage the public to participate in discussions of history, engage in collective reflection, and contribute to the reconstruction of historical memory.

The Convergence of the Two and Their Contemporary Significance

In the text provided by Tan Kim Hong in his book Glimpses of Local History and Memories: The Chinese Malaysian Dimension (鄉土雲烟，2025), these two concepts are closely intertwined.

Contemporary public historians can employ Public History approaches—such as interactive and plural forms of presentation, community participation, and collaborative interpretation—to put the principles of History from Below into practice by documenting local memories and collecting multilingual oral histories.

The ultimate purpose is to broaden and rebalance elite-centered historical narratives: to prevent the history of a nation from being reduced to grand political narratives alone, and instead to make history more inclusive by revealing the lived realities of a society shaped collectively by diverse cultures, communities, and ethnic groups.

|