Kirjahaku

Popularizing the Past tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history. What’s the matter with history? For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past, Nick Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of five historians—Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner—who, in the decades after World War II, published widely read books of national history. Witham compellingly argues that we should understand historians’ efforts to engage with the reading public as a vital part of their postwar identity and mission. He shows how the lives and writings of these five authors were fundamentally shaped by their desire to write histories that captivated both scholars and the elusive general reader. He also reveals how these authors’ efforts could not have succeeded without a publishing industry and a reading public hungry to engage with the cutting-edge ideas then emerging from American universities. As Witham’s book makes clear, before we can properly understand the heated controversies about American history so prominent in today’s political culture, we must first understand the postwar effort to popularize the past.

Popularizing the Past tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history. What’s the matter with history? For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past, Nick Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of five historians—Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner—who, in the decades after World War II, published widely read books of national history. Witham compellingly argues that we should understand historians’ efforts to engage with the reading public as a vital part of their postwar identity and mission. He shows how the lives and writings of these five authors were fundamentally shaped by their desire to write histories that captivated both scholars and the elusive general reader. He also reveals how these authors’ efforts could not have succeeded without a publishing industry and a reading public hungry to engage with the cutting-edge ideas then emerging from American universities. As Witham’s book makes clear, before we can properly understand the heated controversies about American history so prominent in today’s political culture, we must first understand the postwar effort to popularize the past.

The Reagan era is usually seen as an era of unheralded prosperity, and as a high-watermark of Republican success. President Ronald Reagan's belief in "Reaganomics", his media-friendly sound-bites and "can do" personality have come to define the era. However, this was also a time of domestic protest and unrest. Under Reagan the US was directly involved in the revolutions which were sweeping the Central Americas- El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala -and in Nicaragua Reagan armed the Contras who fought the Sandinistas. This book seeks to show how the left within the US reacted and protested against these events. The Nation, Verso Books and the Guardian exploded in popularity, riding high on the back of popular anti-interventionist sentiment in America, while the film-maker Oliver Stone led a group of directors making films with a radical left-wing message. The author shows how the1980s in America were a formative cultural period for the anti-Reaganites as well as the Reaganites, and in doing so charts a new history.