You know, I don't actually think that there ARE many people that do social history as public history, because the things that tend to get done for public history are the unmarked bits of history, which IS the white, male, economic/political/military history stuff. (Iron Jawed Angels, which is AWESOME, is actually the only example I can think of that isn't Civil Rights related that doesn't fall into this mold. The Black History Month phenomena is actually really fascinating, because there are a lot of Civil Rights related popular history things that sell really well.) There's MICRO history, which is where a LOT of the social stuff tends to get shoved, but I don't think of that in the same category as popular history and I'm struggling to articulate WHY. Partially because there's a lack of importance to micro-histories (no one reads anything about the history of toilet seats or the word shit and thinks that they are actually learning, as opposed to just being entertained, whereas I KNOW that there is a perception when reading popular histories that You Are Educating Yourself While Being Entertained) and part of it might actually be commercial success, or at least the assumption of an available market. It's that double bind that most women/people of color/LGBT ect things get put in, of there's no one buying it because no one is writing it but no one is writing it because no one is buying it.
OK! So with that in mind, I guess my initial thoughts on criteria of "What Makes Popular History a Thing"
1.) AESTHETICS. By which I mean that not only is it written in an accessible fashion (clear grammar, minimal/no jargon, a clear through-point that substitutes for a plot, ect) but ALSO has high production values and doesn't "look" like something that you'd read/watch in your history class, but not so far in the popular realm that it risks looking TOO frivolous. It is a fine line to walk, but I think that aesthetics are the number one reason why academia is becoming so irrelevant in today's society - I digress. 2.) On a topic that your everyday person in a bookstore/skimming the TV guide channel would look at and think to themselves "Gee, I should probably know something about that!" 3.) Has some kind of credibility attached to it, which is to say that it does what the layperson who doesn't know things about history would think of when he/she hears about a history project. So there either has to be some kind of a "real life witness" authenticity attached to it (ie "We interviewed ALL the veterans!") or A Person With A Degree And Everything who is prominent in the interviews/publicity before hand. 4.) And finally, either an invisibility to the debates of the historical profession or actively ignoring them. What turns people off to a lot of academia, sad to say, is the implied high bar of understanding that get erected when you reference all of the historical debates that we has historical professionals eat up with a spoon. I'm not saying that it's IMPOSSIBLE to write a public history that adds something to the historiographical debates, but I AM saying that if you do, YOU CAN NOT MENTION IT IN THE BOOK ITSELF, because that is a surefire way to turn your book from being a popular history into something that's just "history" and thus boring and not popular.
ACK. *headdesk* Just pretend that I actually typed POPULAR in the first bit that I responded with, as opposed to the PUBLIC that I actually typed. This is what I get for having too many thoughts about how public histories and popular histories are shaping our national narratives. /0\
Shit, this is what I get for actually wanting to respond to you instead of working on my thesis. DAMN YOU FOR BEING EASIER TO ARTICULATE THAN MELDING PTSD WITH DISABILITY LITERATURE. *shakes fist*
I DID actually think of a few examples of LGBT popular history - George Chauncey's Why Marriage and Boys Don't Cry is another. Both have some really weird flaws, but they both have things that they do REALLY well, and if either of those doesn't count as popular history, then I think that we need to expand our scope of popular histories until they do. And like the Black History Month books/movies (The Great Debaters , Tuskegee Airmen, Red Tails, the SCORES of books on MLK and Rosa Parks) these are all popular history books written from the POV of convincing people that these topics SHOULD be important. (Which tells me that there are probably a fair amount of women's history popular history things out there, I just don't know what they are.) So perhaps a point 2.5 on my original thoughts would be that if the topic of the popular history ISN'T one of the unmarked "important" topics of history, the subtext of the work is convincing the reader/audience that this is why this topic SHOULD be one of the important topics in history.
Huh. So I think with your point about aesthetics, you're sort of...connecting to the same concern that I am with Riv, that on some level pop history is about entertainment in a way that keeps it separate from what we mean by public history? Because much of the rest is overlap, from the ignoring of debates (AHAHAHAHAHA. For the moment we can pretend that your point four doesn't make both of us slightly rageful and incoherent, y/y? We are ZEN and allow the question of epistemological justification flow over like so much water. Ahem) to the requirements of source credibility and the brussels sprouts and broccoli aspect.
I just keep thinking about the whole experience of that new Visitor Center at Gettysburg, and how it is still markedly different from Colonial Williamsburg, even though the NPS has CLEARLY learned something from the whole growth of pop history as a market. What I can't understand is why public history is learning to borrow from pop history, but the changes don't seem to go both ways. Am I missing something? Or is Red Tails crafted in some way differently from Memphis Belle?
Maybe what really makes something available as a subject for pop history is a certain space for redefining it as violence or drama. Iron Jawed Angels works because of the institutional violence, anything war-related somehow qualifies immediately, and the various movements for civil rights and social acceptance are available as pop history texts insofar as they can be recreated as battles for growth, or world-ordering change?
That would explain why Spanish Flu is subject to pop history narrative, while malaria and tuberculosis remain firmly in the academic trenches, wouldn't it? And why we can write pop history of cholera epidemics (Brave Medico Defies Establishment to Save the Lives of Hundreds of Poor, Starving Victorians) but colonial-era famines and smallpox get footnotes.
OK! So with that in mind, I guess my initial thoughts on criteria of "What Makes Popular History a Thing"
1.) AESTHETICS. By which I mean that not only is it written in an accessible fashion (clear grammar, minimal/no jargon, a clear through-point that substitutes for a plot, ect) but ALSO has high production values and doesn't "look" like something that you'd read/watch in your history class, but not so far in the popular realm that it risks looking TOO frivolous. It is a fine line to walk, but I think that aesthetics are the number one reason why academia is becoming so irrelevant in today's society - I digress.
2.) On a topic that your everyday person in a bookstore/skimming the TV guide channel would look at and think to themselves "Gee, I should probably know something about that!"
3.) Has some kind of credibility attached to it, which is to say that it does what the layperson who doesn't know things about history would think of when he/she hears about a history project. So there either has to be some kind of a "real life witness" authenticity attached to it (ie "We interviewed ALL the veterans!") or A Person With A Degree And Everything who is prominent in the interviews/publicity before hand.
4.) And finally, either an invisibility to the debates of the historical profession or actively ignoring them. What turns people off to a lot of academia, sad to say, is the implied high bar of understanding that get erected when you reference all of the historical debates that we has historical professionals eat up with a spoon. I'm not saying that it's IMPOSSIBLE to write a public history that adds something to the historiographical debates, but I AM saying that if you do, YOU CAN NOT MENTION IT IN THE BOOK ITSELF, because that is a surefire way to turn your book from being a popular history into something that's just "history" and thus boring and not popular.
Reply
Reply
I DID actually think of a few examples of LGBT popular history - George Chauncey's Why Marriage and Boys Don't Cry is another. Both have some really weird flaws, but they both have things that they do REALLY well, and if either of those doesn't count as popular history, then I think that we need to expand our scope of popular histories until they do. And like the Black History Month books/movies (The Great Debaters , Tuskegee Airmen, Red Tails, the SCORES of books on MLK and Rosa Parks) these are all popular history books written from the POV of convincing people that these topics SHOULD be important. (Which tells me that there are probably a fair amount of women's history popular history things out there, I just don't know what they are.) So perhaps a point 2.5 on my original thoughts would be that if the topic of the popular history ISN'T one of the unmarked "important" topics of history, the subtext of the work is convincing the reader/audience that this is why this topic SHOULD be one of the important topics in history.
Reply
I just keep thinking about the whole experience of that new Visitor Center at Gettysburg, and how it is still markedly different from Colonial Williamsburg, even though the NPS has CLEARLY learned something from the whole growth of pop history as a market. What I can't understand is why public history is learning to borrow from pop history, but the changes don't seem to go both ways. Am I missing something? Or is Red Tails crafted in some way differently from Memphis Belle?
Maybe what really makes something available as a subject for pop history is a certain space for redefining it as violence or drama. Iron Jawed Angels works because of the institutional violence, anything war-related somehow qualifies immediately, and the various movements for civil rights and social acceptance are available as pop history texts insofar as they can be recreated as battles for growth, or world-ordering change?
That would explain why Spanish Flu is subject to pop history narrative, while malaria and tuberculosis remain firmly in the academic trenches, wouldn't it? And why we can write pop history of cholera epidemics (Brave Medico Defies Establishment to Save the Lives of Hundreds of Poor, Starving Victorians) but colonial-era famines and smallpox get footnotes.
Reply
Leave a comment