scholarly journals Popular Imagination Versus Historical Reality

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Mirela Cufurovic
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Message Boards ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Accuracy ◽  
Online Message Boards ◽  
Historical Films

Historical films have been subject to controversy and criticism within the discipline of history upon the rise of popular interest in new and innovative forms of historical representation. The five to seven years between the release of Gladiator (2000) and Rome (2005-2007) saw an upsurge of historical films focusing on the ‘epic’: the spectacular, monumental and immersive periods of history that exude a mix of historical reality and speculative fiction. This paper argues that it is not historical accuracy or film as historical evidence that matters, but the historical questions and debates that film raises for its audience and the historical profession regarding the past it presents and its implication on history. Such questions and debates base themselves around the extent to which filmmakers are able to interpret history through images and what kind of historical understandings it hopes to achieve. This paper analyses the complexity of public history through a comparative study of reviews on five online message boards, such as IMBD, Amazon, TV.com and Metacritic, relating to HBO’s Rome – chosen due to its unique ability of igniting historiographical debate by presenting history as an accident, thus allowing audiences to question and reinterpret the outcome of historical events. KEYWORDSHBO; Rome; Film; Historiography; Public History; Popular Imagination

scholarly journals Public History in Movement – Present Pasts: the Memory of Slavery in Brazil

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juniele Rabêlo de Almeida ◽  
Larissa Moreira Viana
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public History ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Research Network ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
The Public Sphere

AbstractPresent Pasts: The Memory of Slavery in Brazil is a sound testament to the Brazilian public history movemen.This problematization of the “present pasts of slavery” finds fertile ground in Brazilian public history because of the urgent need to record and analyze representations of this traumatic past, going beyond professional and academic contexts to the public sphere. Public history offers reinvigorating possibilities for mediation between, and intervention in, the past and its publics.The Present Pasts Research Network provides a thought-provoking example of public history’s ability to be sensitive to broad public debate and how the needs, interests, and representations of communities can be addressed through historical representation, interpretation, and active history-making.

scholarly journals Architectural space of Jan Rybkowski’s Warszawska premiera and Aleksander Ford’s Młodość Chopina. The film vision of 19th-century cities in the times of socialist realism

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (31) ◽  
pp. 5-12
Author(s):  
Piotr Kurpiewski
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Architectural Space ◽  
The Past ◽  
Film Images ◽  
Historical Accuracy ◽  
Historical Films ◽  
Similar Character ◽  
Architectural Principles ◽  
The Times

Two Polish historical films set in 19th-century cities were created. The paper analyzes film images of Warsaw, Paris and Vienna. For the needs of Warszawska premiera [Warsaw Première] and especially Młodość Chopina [Youth of Chopin] impressive sets of 19th-century cities were built in an atelier in Łódź. The author presents the main architectural principles behind these visions and points to the problems faced by the artists who wanted to create a credible and convincing illusion of the past. The films of socialist realism are today a peculiar souvenir of the Stalinist culture with its brazen propaganda message. It is, however, worth noting that the staging and decorations in the films depicting the past were created with great historical accuracy and some of the solutions applied during the production of Warsaw Première and Youth of Chopin were a great hint for later films of a similar character.

scholarly journals What heritage does and does not do to identity: some answers from an ethnographic perspective

2005 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
pp. 51-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Gable
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
The Public ◽  
Heritage Sites ◽  
The Past ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Robert Bellah ◽  
Identity Production

This paper explores how caretakers of slave-era heritage sites objectify and enact what Robert Bellah and his co-authors call "communities of memory" in a racially polarized United States and how the public interpret their efforts at creating what amounts to official history. It highlights the often-vexed encounter between those who are in charge of conveying public representations of slavery and race in the antebellum era in the United States and vernacular responses to such representations. It looks at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, which recently has made great efforts to make slaves prominent figures in the landscapes it reconstructs in on-site maps, tours, and literature. Of particular interest are the various ways that vernacular skepticism and cynicism about public portrayals continues to generate controversy at Monticello, and particularly at how the topic of erasure and invisibility remain enduring themes in the popular imagination of what public history is all about when such history focuses on slavery and race. By interrogating public skepticism about official portrayals of the past, the paper moves towards a performative approach to studying what heritage does to identity production rather than a representational approach. Among the identities that are produced at Monticello (and by extension other antebellum sites) are racial and oppositional identities.

The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Thomas Leitch
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Public History ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Many

Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.

The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Of Color ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Free Women

The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Organized chronologically and thematically, the Handbook’s six sections allow readers to consider historical continuities of gendered power as well as individual innovations and ruptures in gender systems. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter bursts with fascinating historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, to Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, to working-class activists mobilizing international movements, to transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars from multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women’s opinions to the suppression of Indian women’s involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. They demonstrate a way to extend this more capacious vision of history forward, setting an intellectual agenda informed by intersectionality and transnationalism, and new understandings of sexuality.

From Nowhere to “Partyslava”

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 299-320
Author(s):  
Peter Barrer
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Slovak Republic ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
English Speaking

Over the past two decades, Prague has cemented itself as a tourist hotspot in the popular imagination. But what of Bratislava, long considered a “poor cousin” to Prague? What images of Bratislava have foreign publics been presented with since the fall of communism in East-Central Europe and the establishment of the Slovak Republic? Building on previous research which has examined visitors’ historical perceptions of Bratislava primarily from a German-speaking perspective, this paper seeks to map the development of Bratislava’s image in media texts from English-speaking countries since 1989 by focusing on two central motifs: Bratislava as a post-communist space and Bratislava as a locus of touristic pleasures (“Partyslava”). The images presented herein will be evaluated and contrasted with local descriptions of Bratislava, thus offering a cross-cultural perspective which will contribute to the wider discussion of popular perceptions of post-communist urban spaces in East-Central Europe.

Reflections on the Public Interpretation of Regional Environmental History In Western Pennsylvania

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 50-69
Author(s):  
Chris J. Magoc
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Natural Resource Extraction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Western Pennsylvania

This essay attempts to counter the scarcity of efforts to address issues of natural resource extraction and environmental exploitation in public history forums. Focused on western Pennsylvania, it argues that the history of industrial development and its deleterious environmental impacts demands a regional vision that not only frames these stories within the ideological and economic context of the past, but also challenges residents and visitors to consider this history in light of the related environmental concerns of our own time. The essay explores some of the difficult issues faced by public historians and practitioners as they seek to produce public environmental histories that do not elude opportunities to link past and present in meaningful ways.

The Greek Historiography of the 1940s. A Reassessment

Südosteuropa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Polymeris Voglis ◽  
Ioannis Nioutsikos
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Public History ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greek Historiography ◽  
Historical Production

AbstractThis article is a presentation and assessment of Greek historiography and public memory regarding the period of occupation, resistance, and civil war during the 1940s. It examines historical production and culture from the first postwar years until 1989 and explains the relation between the changing visions of the past and political developments in Greece. In addition, the article evaluates works published after 2000, in order to discuss new questions that were raised and the ensuing debates. The article concludes by addressing themes that can revitalize the study of the 1940s, regarding the analytical framework, the territorial and social dimension, the notion of state and governmentality, and the issue of memory and public history.

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