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Author: Nick Witham Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226826996 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
"Nick Witham investigates how widely popular history books have gotten written, promoted, and institutionalized. Not just a matter of writing style, popular accessibility is also a product of an author's frame of mind, the editor's skill, and the publisher's marketing acumen, among other factors. Witham has done extensive work not just in historians' archives but in publishers' files. His primary subjects are Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Gerda Lerner, and Howard Zinn-all popular historians who were explicitly concerned with the question of popularity. Collectively, they reveal the cross-influences of popular history writing and American popular culture"--
Author: Nick Witham Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226826996 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
"Nick Witham investigates how widely popular history books have gotten written, promoted, and institutionalized. Not just a matter of writing style, popular accessibility is also a product of an author's frame of mind, the editor's skill, and the publisher's marketing acumen, among other factors. Witham has done extensive work not just in historians' archives but in publishers' files. His primary subjects are Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Gerda Lerner, and Howard Zinn-all popular historians who were explicitly concerned with the question of popularity. Collectively, they reveal the cross-influences of popular history writing and American popular culture"--
Author: Nick Witham Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226826988 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
Popularizing the Past tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history. What’s the matter with history? For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past, Nick Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of five historians—Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner—who, in the decades after World War II, published widely read books of national history. Witham compellingly argues that we should understand historians’ efforts to engage with the reading public as a vital part of their postwar identity and mission. He shows how the lives and writings of these five authors were fundamentally shaped by their desire to write histories that captivated both scholars and the elusive general reader. He also reveals how these authors’ efforts could not have succeeded without a publishing industry and a reading public hungry to engage with the cutting-edge ideas then emerging from American universities. As Witham’s book makes clear, before we can properly understand the heated controversies about American history so prominent in today’s political culture, we must first understand the postwar effort to popularize the past.
Author: Roy Rosenzweig Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 9780231500487 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
Some people make photo albums, collect antiques, or visit historic battlefields. Others keep diaries, plan annual family gatherings, or stitch together patchwork quilts in a tradition learned from grandparents. Each of us has ways of communing with the past, and our reasons for doing so are as varied as our memories. In a sweeping survey, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen asked 1,500 Americans about their connection to the past and how it influences their daily lives and hopes for the future. The result is a surprisingly candid series of conversations and reflections on how the past infuses the present with meaning. Rosenzweig and Thelen found that people assemble their experiences into narratives that allow them to make sense of their personal histories, set priorities, project what might happen next, and try to shape the future. By using these narratives to mark change and create continuity, people chart the courses of their lives. A young woman from Ohio speaks of giving birth to her first child, which caused her to reflect upon her parents and the ways that their example would help her to become a good mother. An African American man from Georgia tells how he and his wife were drawn to each other by their shared experiences and lessons learned from growing up in the South in the 1950s. Others reveal how they personalize historical events, as in the case of a Massachusetts woman who traces much of her guarded attitude toward life to witnessing the assassination of John F. Kennedy on television when she was a child. While the past is omnipresent to Americans, "history" as it is usually defined in textbooks leaves many people cold. Rosenzweig and Thelen found that history as taught in school does not inspire a strong connection to the past. And they reveal how race and ethnicity affects how Americans perceive the past: while most white Americans tend to think of it as something personal, African Americans and American Indians are more likely to think in terms of broadly shared experiences--like slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the violation of Indian treaties." Rosenzweig and Thelen's conclusions about the ways people use their personal, family, and national stories have profound implications for anyone involved in researching or presenting history, as well as for all those who struggle to engage with the past in a meaningful way.
Author: Kirsten Belgum Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 9780803212831 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
In countless articles on culture, politics, landscape, industry, history, and other topics, the Gartenlaube played an influential role in nineteenth-century Germany's larger effort to forge a national identity for itself. In fact, Belgum argues that the search for, and development of, national identity in Germany was inextricably linked to the writings of the Gartenlaube and other popular magazines. Such publications served both as a public repository of mythic memory for the nation and as a source of new national images for a self-consciously modern Germany.
Author: Susan Porter Benson Publisher: Temple University Press ISBN: 9780877224136 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 454
Book Description
In recent years, history has been increasingly popularized through television docudramas, history museums, paperback historical novels, grassroots community history projects, and other public representations of historical knowledge. This collection of lively and accessible essays is the first examination of the rapidly growing field called "public history." Based in part on articles written for the Radical History Review, these eighteen original essays take a sometimes irreverent look at how history is presented to the public in such diverse settings as children's books, Colonial Williamsburg, and the Statue of Liberty, Presenting the Past is organized into three areas which consider the role of mass media ("Packaging the Past"), the affects of applied history ("Professionalizing the Past") and the importance of grassroots efforts to shape historical consciousness ("Politicizing the Past"). The first section examines the large-scale production and dissemination of popular history by mass culture. The contributors criticize many of these Hollywood and Madison Avenue productions that promote historical amnesia or affirm dominant values and institutions. In "Professionalizing the Past," the authors show how non-university based professional historians have also affected popular historical consciousness through their work in museums, historic preservation, corporations, and government agencies. Finally, the book considers what has been labeled "people's history"--oral history projects, slide shows, films, and local exhibits--and assesses its attempts to reach such diverse constituents as workers, ethnic groups, women, and gays. Of essential interest to students of history, Presenting the Past also explains to the general reader how Americans have come to view themselves, their ancestors, and their heritage through the influence of mass media, popular culture, and "public history." Author note: Susan Porter Benson is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Bristol Community College in Massachusetts. Stephen Brier is Director of the American Social History Project and Senior Research Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Roy Rosenzweig is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Oral History Program at George Mason University in Virginia.
Author: Gordon S. Wood Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 9781594201547 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 340
Book Description
Wood examines how the historian's craft has changed radically over the past 40 years. This work offers insight into what great historians do, how they can stumble, and what strains of thought have dominated the marketplace of ideas in historical scholarship.
Author: Stefan Berger Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136592881 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 378
Book Description
Popularizing National Pasts is the first truly cross-national and comparative study of popular national histories, their representations, the meanings given to them and their uses, which expands outside the confines of Western Europe and the US. It draws a picture of popular histories which is European in the full sense of this term. One of its fortes is the inclusion of Eastern Europe. The cross-national angle of Popularizing National Pasts is apparent in the scope of its comparative project, as well as that of the longue durée it covers. Apart from essays on Britain, France, and Germany, the collection includes studies of popular histories in Scandinavia, Eastern and Southern Europe, notably Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Armenia, Russia and the Ukraine, as well as considering the US and Argentina. Cross-national comparison is also a central concern of the thirteen case studies in the volume, which are, each, devoted to comparing between two, or more, national historical cultures. Thus temporality –both continuities and breaks- in popular notions of the past, its interpretations and consumption, is examined in the long continuum. The volume makes available to English readers, probably for the first time, the cutting edge of Eastern European scholarship on popular histories, nationalism and culture.
Author: David M. Dean Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 1118508920 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 576
Book Description
An authoritative overview of the developing field of public history reflecting theory and practice around the globe This unique reference guides readers through this relatively new field of historical inquiry, exploring the varieties and forms of public history, its relationship with popular history, and the ways in which the field has evolved internationally over the past thirty years. Comprised of thirty-four essays written by a group of leading international scholars and public history practitioners, the work not only introduces readers to the latest scholarly academic research, but also to the practice and pedagogy of public history. It pays equal attention to the emergence of public history as a distinct field of historical inquiry in North America, the importance of popular history and ‘history from below’ in Europe and European colonial-settler states, and forms of historical consciousness in non-Western countries and peoples. It also provides a timely guide to the state of the discipline, and offers an innovative and unprecedented engagement with methodological and theoretical problems associated with public history. Generously illustrated throughout, The Companion to Public History’s chapters are written from a variety of perspectives by contributors from all continents and from a wide variety of backgrounds, disciplines, and experiences. It is an excellent source for getting readers to think about history in the public realm, and how present day concerns shape the ways in which we engage with and represent the past. Cutting-edge companion volume for a developing area of study Comprises 36 essays by leading authorities on all aspects of public history around the world Reflects different national/regional interpretations of public history Offers some essays in teachable forms: an interview, a roundtable discussion, a document analysis, a photo essay. Covers a full range of public history practice, including museums, archives, memorial sites as well as historical fiction, theatre, re-enactment societies and digital gaming Discusses the continuing challenges presented by history within our broad, collective memory, including museum controversies, repatriation issues, ‘textbook’ wars, and commissions for Truth and Reconciliation The Companion is intended for senior undergraduate students and graduate students in the rapidly growing field of public history and will appeal to those teaching public history or who wish to introduce a public history dimension to their courses.
Author: Trine Stauning Willert Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1498563392 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 291
Book Description
This book deals with historical consciousness and its artistic expressions in contemporary Greece since 1989 from the point of view that contemporary Greeks have been faced with the contradictions between on the one hand a glorious, world-famous yet distant past and, on the other, a traumatic contemporary history of wars, expulsions, civil strife and political and economic crises. Such clashes of imaginary identifications and collective traumas call for interpretations not only from historians but also from artists and storytellers. Therefore, the chapters in this volume explore the ways in which sensitive and creative perspectives of art approach and appropriate history in Greece. Through a rich collection of analytical case studies and creative reflections on Greece’s past, present, and future this volume presents the reader with the ways a set of contemporary Greek storytellers in different genres have incorporated previously under-explored or little-known themes, events, and epochs in modern Greek history showing how the past, by being interpreted and represented in the present, can teach us a lot about contemporary Greek society. The themes that form the point of departure for the stories told or retold cover various significant components of Greek history and culture such as ancient myths, the Ottoman period, the Greek War of Independence and the Greek Civil War, but also less prominent or known aspects of Greek history such as the Greek Enlightenment, the long and tragic history of Greek Jewry, and migration to and from Greece.
Author: Nick Witham
Author: Nick Witham
Author: Nick Witham
Author: Roy Rosenzweig
Author: Kirsten Belgum
Author: Susan Porter Benson
Author: Gordon S. Wood
Author: Stefan Berger
Author: David M. Dean
Author: Trine Stauning Willert
Author: Dugald Mitchell