Abstract
The publication of Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life in 1998 signalled a landmark in the empirical study of popular and public history.1 It outlined a way of conceptualising the character of popular and public forms of history, and was the first major attempt to generate sociological insight into the ways in which ordinary people understand and use history in their everyday lives.
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Notes
R. Rosenzweig and D. Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1998 ).
M. Zuckerman, ‘The Presence of the Present, The End of History’, The Public Historian, 22: 1 (2000) 19.
R. Rosenzweig, ‘Not A Simple Task: Professional Historians Meet Popular Historymakers’, The Public Historian, 22: 1 (2000) 37.
D. Thelen, ‘But Is It History?’, The Public Historian, 22: 1 (2000) 40.
However, there are also those historians who seek to bridge the gap between popular and academic history. Cf H. Kean, P. Martin and S. J. Morgan (eds) Seeing History: Public History in Britain Now ( London: Francis Boutle, 2000 ).
L. Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold Publishers, 2000) chapter 6 and
J. Liddington. Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold Publishers, 2000) chapter 6 and J. Liddington, ‘What Is Public History?’, Oral History, 30: 1 (2002) 83–93.
C. L. Becker, Everyman His Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics ( New York: Crofts & Co., 1935 ) p. 235.
R. Samuel, ‘History Workshop Methods’, History Workshop Journal, 9 (1980) 168.
R. Samuel and P. Thompson (eds), The Myths We Live By ( London: Routledge, 1990 ), p. 5.
The quote from Faulkner is not wholly accurate. The phrase in Requiem for a Nun reads: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’. W. Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960 ), p. 81.
R. Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture ( London: Verso, 1994 ), p. 3.
B. E. Jensen, Historie–livsverden og fag ( Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2003 ).
R. Schörken, ‘Geschichte als Lebenswelt’, in K. Bergmann et al (eds) Handbuch der Geschichtsdidaktik, 1st edn ( Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1979 ), pp. 3–4.
R. Schörken, ‘Geschichte als Lebenswelt’, in Bergmann et al (eds) Handbuch der Geschichtsdidaktik, 3rd edn ( Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1985 ), p. 5.
E. Kessler, ‘Historia magistra vitae. Zur Rehabilitation eines überwundenen Topos’, in R. Schörken (ed.) Der Gegenwartsbezug der Geschichte ( Stuttgart: Klett, 1981 ), p. 28.
R. Schörken, Geschichte in der Alltagswelt. Wie uns Geschichte begegnet und was wir mit ihr machen ( Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981 ), p. 18.
Roy Rosenzweig, ‘How Americans Use and Think about the Past’, in P. N. Stearns et al (eds) Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives ( New York: New York University Press, 2000 ), p. 280.
H. Welzer and H. J. Markowitsch, ‘Towards a Bio-psycho-social Model of Autobiographical Memory’, Memory, 13: 1 (2005) 73.
K. Nelson and R. Fivush, ‘The Emergence of Autobiographical Memory: A Social Cultural Developmental Theory’, Psychological Review, 111: 2 (2004) 486–511.
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Jensen, B.E. (2009). Usable Pasts: Comparing Approaches to Popular and Public History. In: Ashton, P., Kean, H. (eds) People and their Pasts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234468_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234468_3
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