History Comes Alive

In 1976 the national television airing of Roots was memorable in U.S. popular culture and public history. Though the author Alex Haley had long been researching his family ties to Africa, his heartbreaking miniseries showed not only how black Americans could find and re-create an identity in a distant time but also how almost all audiences could become so emotionally moved as to consider a different present and future for race-torn America. Focusing on that still-ongoing shift in how Americans understand and relate to their past is History Comes Alive, by Malgorzata J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, an assistant professor of history and associate director of American University's graduate program in public history. Expanding her 2012 Brown University doctoral dissertation in American studies, Rymsza-Pawlowska has produced a thought-provoking work that will generate considerable discussion. Rejecting the notion that the history-inspired “nostalgia” of the 1970s was mere escapism, Rymsza-Pawlowska sees it instead as part of a slow transformation in public history and popular culture. In so doing, she develops six case studies: commercial television; federal planning of the American Revolution bicentennial; building preservation; history-based exhibits and sites; reenactments; and nonmainstream, history-inspired efforts during the bicentennial. As wide-ranging political, social, and economic crises were weakening the dominance of traditional, establishment-driven, objective history in the 1960s and early 1970s, each of those six fields was shifting from “a logic of preservation” (a philosophy of history based on material evidence and shared assumptions about progress and America) to “a logic of reenactment” (a more personalized, interactive, and affective history making) (p. 6). As such, history came alive

American history · Economic history · Media studies · Political history · Political science · Politics · Popular culture · Popular history · Public history · Social history (medicine · Sociology · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Law · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Race, History, and American Society