Engaging the past : mass culture and the production of historical knowledge

Reading films, television dramas, reality shows, and virtual exhibits, Engaging the Past examines the making and meaning of history for everyday viewers. Alison Landsberg considers the films Hotel Rwanda (2004), Good Night and Good Luck (2005), and Milk (2008); the television dramas Deadwood, Mad Men, and Rome; the reality shows Colonial House, Frontier House, and Texas Ranch House; and The Secret Annex Online, accessed through the website for the Anne Frank House, and the Kristallnacht exhibit, featured on the United States Holocaust Museum website. These mass-cultural texts cultivate what Landsberg calls an "affective engagement" with the past, tying the viewer to an event or person and fostering a sense of intimacy that does more than simply transport the viewer back in time. Affect, she suggests, can also work to disorient viewers, forcibly pushing them out of the narrative and back into their own bodies. By analyzing these specific popular history formats, Landsberg shows how they provoke historical thinking and produce historical knowledge, prompting a reconsideration of what constitutes history and an understanding of how it works in the contemporary mediated public sphere. Book jacket. Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-204) and index. xi, 213 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm