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.
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.
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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.
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