This interdisciplinary collection considers public and popular history within a global framework, seeking to understand considerations of local, domestic histories and the ways they interact with broader discourses. Grounded in particular local and national situations, the book addresses the issues associated with popular history in a globalised cultural world, such as: how the study of popular history might work in the future; new ways in which the terms ‘popular’ and ‘public’ might inform one another and nuance scholarship; transnational, intercultural models of ‘pastness’; cultural translatability; and the demand for high-quality work on new technologies and history.

A wide range of international contributors consider a broad selection of locale and media, from American television and Canadian heritage to the representation of history in contemporary Chinese culture. They consider the way in which the study of public or popular texts invoke multiple historiographies, and demonstrate our need to think about public and popular aspects of the past in new, ‘emerging’ locales, such as China, Eastern Europe and South America.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Rethinking History.

Contents

Introduction Jerome de Groot 1. The Making History initiative and Australian popular history Michelle Arrow 2. Intervention: Public Women and Public History: Revolution, Prostitution and Testimony in Cuba Carrie Hamilton 3. Going on an Outing: the Historic House and Queer Public History Alison Oram 4. A ‘phantom freedom in a phantom modernity’?: Protestant Missionaries, Domestic Ideology and Narratives of Modernity in an Arab Context Hoda Elsadda 5. Intervention: Some thoughts on the problem of ‘popular/public history’ in China Gotelind Müller 6. Public history and the fragments of place: archaeology, history, and heritage site development in southern Alberta James Oppquo;perpetually dividing and suturing the past and present’: Mad Men and the illusions of history Jerome de Groot 8. Intervention: Hacking history, from analog to digital and back again William J. Turkel

Author Bio

Jerome de Groot is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. He is the author of The Historical Novel (2009), Consuming History (2008) and Royalist Identities (2004), as well as numerous articles on manuscript studies, historiography, popular history and early modern court culture.