Abstract

The work seeks to reflect on the alleged crisis of history today by comparing the different ways in which historical disciplines have developed outside the academy during the 1970s and 1980s. For that it tries to reconstruct the extensive discussions about applied history which are at the origin of the American Public History, its export to England and Australia. Then it compares them with the contemporary debates on the French cultural heritage among administrators, ethnographers and historians. Finally, it tries to define some working hypotheses on the developments of the Italian historiography outside the academy in the same period.