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REALITY, IDENTITY AND EMPATHY: THE CHANGING FACE OF SOCIAL HISTORY TELEVISION
| By Tristram Hunt |
Queen Mary, University of London |
| The last decade has witnessed a remarkable renaissance of public history in Britain. Historical programming commands a dominant position in the terrestrial television schedules; radio remains replete with 'discussions of' and 'journeys into' the past; history and genealogy magazines provide a vibrant media; non-fiction book sales continue their upward ascent; while cinema mines the imperial and military past with renewed gusto and invariably woeful results. |
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More broadly, as in the United States, popular interest in 'living history' is flourishing. New museums in subjects from transport to urban history to popular music are component parts of every regenerating city while debates over anniversaries and commemorations fill the newspapers. The traditional heritage institutes are expanding furiously: membership of the National Trust in Britain has more than doubled in fifteen years to some 3.3 million. Country houses, galleries, and historic sites are all experiencing record visitor numbers. Arguably, this fervent historicism is excelling any previously, typically elite-led engagement with the memory of the past. Current trends far exceed, for example, the Greek revival of the late eighteenth or Gothic revival of the nineteenth century. According to Professor Richard Evans of the University of Cambridge, "Consciousness of history is all-pervasive at the start of the twenty-first century."1 |
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The emergent fashion for history is not limited to the unofficial realms of knowledge. Figures released by the UK Universities and Colleges Admissions Service reveal that students applying to read history at university rose by 4.3% in 2003. Today in Great Britain, there are some 15,000 sixth-formers taking A Level history, 30,000 undergraduates reading history, 3,000 research students studying for higher degrees, and 3,000 university teachers. According to Professor David Cannadine of the Institute of Historical Research, "more history is being taught, researched, written and read, and is concerned with a larger part of human experience, and embraces a wider spread of the globe, than ever before."2 |
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But while more history is certainly being consumed, it is far from clear how much is nurturing a deep and abiding sense of the past. Moreover, the inescapable irony is that while ever greater volumes of this 'history' is concerned with the lives and experiences of those traditionally marginalised by text-book treatments of the past, it remains the case that social history in its classic form has been progressively abandoned. As James E. Cronin has noted of social history within the academy, "the era of totalizing and interconnected social history epitomized by [Eric] Hobsbawm's work was premised on a politics and a set of intellectual assumptions that have passed."3 The same is true of history in the media: with the past an attractive and lucrative media commodity, elements of social purpose, analytical rigour and contemporary relevance have suffered. But at the same time, the success of social history in generating new interests and areas for study is reflected in an ever expanding volume of historical programming dealing with diverse and divergent forms of human behaviour. |
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The challenge for social historians is to marshal today's energetic and accelerating interest in the past towards more fundamental questions of structure and process. It means refuting the orthodoxy that popular history has only to be concerned with biographies, battles and high political drama—and, instead, opening up avenues to the past that deal with the traditional concerns of social history in engaging and relevant formats. |
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