I think--for me, at least, pop history and public history are different things. Or, more that they're overlapping Venn diagram fields, with some works being both and others being just one or the other. Public history tends to fall closer to the idea of history done outside of traditional academia, but with the same broad set of requirements in place. It follows (on some level, at least) the belief that there be an historiographic foundation for the claims, and that there needs to be an attempt to present a clear, nuanced contextualized version of events
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Zinn is like the Ebenezer Scrooge of history, if Ebenezer Scrooge had been a Marxist with a decided predilection for the sordid details rather than the big picture. I love him, but mostly as a writer and a philosopher. *shrugs*
(The lit review is kicking my ass, but it will be finished this weekend if it kills me. I'm sick of looking at the cursor blinking at me all day.)
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
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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'
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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
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To me, pop history is anything produced with a the 'general non-specialist population' in mind that is also aimed at making money and is therefore dressed up in a sparkly costume. If that makes sense? A lot of the BBC documentaries are in my view pop history instead of public history, although the line is blurry.
Pop history also doesn't take itself too seriously when it comes to correctly reporting facts or naming sources. Take for example the "Horrible Histories" series that is aimed at kids and thus turns historical facts into funny little clips that are not always entirely correct. Whereas public history does try to pretend it is citing real facts and being proper only without the academic language.
I almost want to say pop history is fiction (a la Dan Brown), but it's not quite that. In a way, it's history dressed up as a gripping narrative (Yes, I am aware that ALL history is a narrative but a lot of it pretends it isn't).
Huh. I hadn't even considered "Horrible Histories" as pop history, honestly. Because so much pop history DOES take itself seriously, and I think I was working from a baseline that to qualify for even that label, there needed to be a fundamental understanding that some effort at truth (or the idealized/conceptual/normative notion of truth that fiction can convey) had to be present. So, yeah. Dan Brown wouldn't even begin to qualify, because that's meant as pure fiction that happens to be set in the past. But Jeff Shaara's novels might, because for all that the conversations are fictionalized, he's making a good faith effort to give the reader some grasp of his notion of historical reality
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Guns, Germs, and Steel (and Collapse) could be an example of pop history, maybe? It's definitely written in a "explaining historical processes to non-history savvy people" style, and I found a lot of its conclusions fairly obvious. (I will return tomorrow to actually address the "what is pop history" question, as I just realized it is 1 am and my coherency is gone.)
Huh. Maybe, although I'm pretty sure that most of Diamond's work falls closer to anthropology than history. Guns certainly does, for all that most academic anthropologists go purple and spluttering at the very idea that Diamond might fall under their aegis. Then again, anthropology frequently falls into the gray area of things that maybe ought to be history but don't have any documentary evidence. It's another interesting question, where THAT line might be.
I have nothing to contribute, but I've been reading pop science and frustrating myself with all the ways that the average pop science book is more pop than science, so I am doing the 'chin-on-hands, listening and commiserating' thing here.
(The Poisoner's Handbook was entertaining, even if everything did build thematically and rather more neatly than the actual history of forensic science possibly could. The Disappearing Spoon, meanwhile, is so in love with its metaphors that the science is hard to make out. I'm hoping it will improve as I progress.)
Pop science is...right, if I'm mostly incoherent about pop history, I am ENTIRELY incoherent about pop science. History being turned to fit entertainment, I can get. It at least starts as narrative, and it's not like there aren't a million debates about what counts as valid historiography and how much normative weight we ought to give historical conclusions.
But pop science is just...GAH. *handwaves awkwardly*
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(The lit review is kicking my ass, but it will be finished this weekend if it kills me. I'm sick of looking at the cursor blinking at me all day.)
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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' ( ... )
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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 ( ... )
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To me, pop history is anything produced with a the 'general non-specialist population' in mind that is also aimed at making money and is therefore dressed up in a sparkly costume. If that makes sense? A lot of the BBC documentaries are in my view pop history instead of public history, although the line is blurry.
Pop history also doesn't take itself too seriously when it comes to correctly reporting facts or naming sources. Take for example the "Horrible Histories" series that is aimed at kids and thus turns historical facts into funny little clips that are not always entirely correct. Whereas public history does try to pretend it is citing real facts and being proper only without the academic language.
I almost want to say pop history is fiction (a la Dan Brown), but it's not quite that. In a way, it's history dressed up as a gripping narrative (Yes, I am aware that ALL history is a narrative but a lot of it pretends it isn't).
Sorry, LJ was stupid, thus the edit.
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(The Poisoner's Handbook was entertaining, even if everything did build thematically and rather more neatly than the actual history of forensic science possibly could. The Disappearing Spoon, meanwhile, is so in love with its metaphors that the science is hard to make out. I'm hoping it will improve as I progress.)
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But pop science is just...GAH. *handwaves awkwardly*
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