The Rise of Popular History and the Future of Academic History

We are living in the midst of a renaissance of popular, non-academic history: history-on-film most obviously but also historical novels, autobiographies, memoirs and historical comics.  Moreover, those who produce, direct and write these new histories are making serious claims for their intellectual legitimacy -- claims that can no longer be dismissed as easily as we have dismissed them in the past.  Academic historians are only gradually awakening to this phenomenon -- and only gradually realizing how unprepared we are to deal with it.   In May of 2006 Robert Schneider, then editor of the American Historical Review, announced that that AHR was suspending its film reviews because "our reviewers have usually been historians with little training or expertise in film studies and often with little interest in the medium other than as moviegoers." 

This was to have been a "temporary suspension" but as I write these words, in January of 2009, it has been almost three years since the AHR published a film review (historical novels, autobiographies and memoirs are now as they always have been, utterly beyond consideration).  This paper describes the rise of this new popular history -- the new historical fiction in particular -- and explores its implications for the future of academic history.  The history of history through the end of the twentieth-century may indeed be a narrative describing the rise of academic history to global hegemony, as Peter Burke and some others have recently argued.  But If academic history hopes to have a hand in shaping historical consciousness in the twenty-first century, it will have to come to terms with the rising influence of this new popular history.  For it is in the yet-to-be-defined relationship between academic history and the proliferation of popular histories, in various forms in virtually every developed country of the world, that the past will be defined.