This week’s readings deliberately blurred the line between “public” and “popular” history by considering the medium of historical films. Glassberg’s study of public reactions to Ken Burns’ The Civil War was extremely interesting, and went to further illustrate his main contention that history serves the American public in ways that academic historians often fail to recognize. Like the rest of Sense of History, this chapter left me feeling conflicted about the desirability of what Glassberg describes. Does it matter that The Civil War does not address the thorny racial issues of the antebellum and reconstruction eras as well as it could? I would like to hear Glassberg debate James and Lois Horton on this point. That said, I think it is a little ridiculous to compare The Civil War with Birth of a Nation as some academic critics did.
I also had mixed feelings regarding Michael Frisch’s article, although for different reasons. Unlike The Civil War I have never seen Vietnam: A Television History, so I had no frame of reference for evaluating Frisch’s commentary. Nevertheless, I felt that some of Frisch’s basic criticism of the public use of oral history was troubling. Why does Frisch claim that there is not much “critical self-consciousness of what oral history is?” This is manifestly not the case, even in 1990. As far as I could see, all of the issues which Frisch raises about oral history have been dealt with even in the literature on oral history we have read as part of this class. I suspect that Frisch’s real discomfort comes not from the utilization of oral history, but from the fact that Vietnam does not employ a blatant interpretative narrative, giving the audience the opportunity to apply their own meanings to the events under discussion. Again, I think an academic debate between Glassberg and Frisch would be interesting.
I wonder when Frisch wrote his article, but I think Frisch is mainly concerned with using oral histories to present multiple perspectives. I think currently scholars see the value of oral histories as a way of presenting multiple perspectives about an event. I think Frisch sees that people's oral histories are powerful because they tell a certain perspective over an event, such as Vietnam, and give a personal experience.
ReplyDeleteI like how you mentioned that historical cinema does what academic historians fail to do, which seems to be about bcoming popular enough to intrigue the masses. The good old private versus public history story. Your post is intriguing and I would like to see that discussion, too.
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