Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture

Abstract

Jerome de Groot takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through the seemingly countless forms which historical experiences of one kind or another can take in popular culture nowadays, here located principally, but not exclusively, in a British context. Among the genres which de Groot handles particularly well are the celebrity biography, antiques and genealogy on television, the campus novel and film, historical re-enactments, tribute bands, war games and graphic novels. As this sampling suggests, the centrality of ‘history’ to these various forms is variable, and the suspicion lingers that, given the runaway diversity of popular culture, there would be sufficient material to write a very similar book on any one of a number of themes. Had de Groot tackled, for example, physics in popular culture, animals in popular culture, or let us say ‘X’ in popular culture, many of the same messages could be conveyed: ‘X is part of an important and complex set of representational practices’, ‘X is a socially and culturally constructed and consumed entity, able at once to hold within itself difference and sameness’, ‘X demonstrate[s] the contradictory multifariousness of contemporary experience’, ‘X is engaged with on a personal, group and family level; it can be experienced in a range of ways at the same time’, and ‘in this teeming diversity lies the challenge and the concern for’ experts or professionals in X (and where X = history, this means us, the academic historians).

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