Popular history
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The Story of Mankind is popcorn history, slavered with butter and sprinkled with salt for viewers to munch on during their history tutorial. The spirit invokes the achievements of Moses, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, da Vinci, Galileo, Shakespeare. Scratch counters with examples of humankind at its worst: Neronian Rome, the Salem witchcraft trials, the slave-holding South, two world wars, and Hiroshima—the latter, an image too iconic for comment. The spirit calls a final witness, a toddler representing the world of tomorrow. “Let there be a tomorrow for the planet Earth,” the spirit pleads. Although he argues eloquently that evil, when crushed, has made humankind stronger, the tribunal is unimpressed. "--The Screen Is Red: Hollywood, Communism, and the Cold War (2016) by Bernard F. Dick |
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Popular history is a broad and somewhat ill-defined genre of historiography that takes a popular approach, aims at a wide readership, and usually emphasizes narrative, personality and vivid detail over scholarly analysis. The term is used in contradistinction to professional academic or scholarly history writing which is usually more specialized and technical and, thus, less accessible to the general reader.
Some popular historians are without academic affiliation while others are academics, or former academics, that have (according to one writer) "become somehow abstracted from the academic arena, becoming cultural commentators". Many worked as journalists, perhaps after taking an initial degree in history.
Popular historians may become nationally renowned or best-selling authors and may or may not serve the interests of particular political viewpoints in their roles as "public historians". Many authors of "official histories" and "authorized biographies" would qualify as popular historians serving the interests of particular institutions or public figures.
Popular historians aim to appear on the "general lists" of general publishers, rather than the university presses that have dominated academic publishing in recent years. Increasingly, popular historians have taken to television where they are able, often accompanying a series of documentaries with a tie-in book.
Examples
Recent examples of American popular historians with academic affiliations include Stephen E. Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Pauline Maier. Non-academics include Walter Lord, Bruce Catton, Shelby Foote, David McCullough, Daniel J. Boorstin and Barbara W. Tuchman.
Recent examples of British popular historians who are also academics include Niall Ferguson, Christopher Hibbert and Simon Schama, and – from a previous generation – Eric Hobsbawm, Paul Johnson, E. P. Thompson, A. J. P. Taylor (an early pioneer of history on television) and Christopher Hill. Much of Hugh Trevor-Roper's output was also directed at a popular audience.
John Julius Norwich, Nirad Chaudhuri, Ramchandra Guha, Charles Allen, Rutger Bregman, Tariq Ali, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson are popular historians who have never been academics.
See also
- Public history
- Academic history
- History magazines
- Narrative history
- Official history
- People's history
- Popular science
- Whig history
