Empathy and enfranchisement: Popular histories

Abstract

This article considers the media phenomenon of ‘history’ over the past decade. In particular I am interested in the complex types of historical engagement available, and what these various models of ‘experience’ suggest for consumption and understanding of the past. Analysing re-enactment, ‘reality’ history TV and first-person shooter (FPS) computer games, I suggest that engagement with the discourse of ‘history’ in popular culture is a complicated and problematic issue. I further suggest that these models offer the professional academic historian a number of interesting methodological and epistemological paradigms. All three of the media I consider refuse to fit into specific, disciplined or institutionalised order. Their dynamism and levels of complexity are crucial to their consumption. Analysis of history-as-experience illustrates that it is a set of narratives divorced from an institutionalised framework, used in different and dissident ways by a variety of social groups. These uses interact with the notion of ‘history’ as an academic pursuit but also create a space between ontological and intellectual approaches to the past. On the one hand increased access and interrogation of historical narratives suggests an enfranchising of the population into history; on the other the factuality of history organises and disciplines.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.