Beginning this fall, I want to encourage my students to think more reflectively about how the past is represented—not only in terms of content, but also in terms of form. Toward this end, I am giving my survey students a window into our quirky, insular profession. On the first day, I gave them a brief outline of the differences between academic history, public history, and popular history. While the barriers sometimes blur, these are useful categories, and perhaps the biggest difference between the three is the understanding of audience.
Audience is a big theme of the course; the first question I ask when we evaluate a primary source is “Who is the audience?” In academic history, the audience is usually a small group of scholars and students. For public history, a broad generally educated community is usually targeted. Popular history is almost always directed at anyone seeking entertainment and often produced for the purpose of profit. Perhaps this last clause, “produced for the purpose of profit” creates an incommensurable distinction, but I like to think we can still evaluate the relative merits of academic, public, and popular history in qualified yet still similar ways.
Audience is a big theme of the course; the first question I ask when we evaluate a primary source is “Who is the audience?” In academic history, the audience is usually a small group of scholars and students. For public history, a broad generally educated community is usually targeted. Popular history is almost always directed at anyone seeking entertainment and often produced for the purpose of profit. Perhaps this last clause, “produced for the purpose of profit” creates an incommensurable distinction, but I like to think we can still evaluate the relative merits of academic, public, and popular history in qualified yet still similar ways.
So, with this charge, the students will read three autobiographical pieces and compare them to works of academic, public, and popular history. For the first, the students are reading Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition and then reading Andrés Reséndez, A Land so Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (2009). Next, the students will read Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and then evaluate a digital museum exhibit, and finally we will read Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave and then watch the soon-to-be-released major motion picture of the same name. I look forward to updating you all on how each assignment progresses.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear any thoughts you have.
That should spark a lot of discussion and make for some great essays. I’d be curious to know how your students responded. Are you encouraging them to question the utility or merits of those distinctions? Academics often bewail the barriers between “popular” and “academic” history. I wonder if your students did, too.
Thanks! I’m certainly excited for the semester. You are right that many academics “bewail the barriers between “popular” and “academic” history,” but I think just as many academics roll their eyes at popular treatments of the past. I will certainly encourage the students question these distinctions, but my own feelings are quite ambivalent. We do have a problem in the academy; our work seems increasingly disconnected from public discourse, but it’s rare to find popular-minded historians who do not sacrifice the rigor of the discipline. I’m looking forward to hearing how my students will think about these problems.