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Pasts Unknown (CST Blog post)

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Just saw a promo for the last, posthumous season of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” on CNN today and thought I’d post this link to my first piece on the Critical Studies in Television Blog.

Enjoy!

https://cstonline.net/pasts-unknown-by-andrew-j-salvati/

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Television Crusade

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Better late than never, I suppose. Here’s a link to my post over at the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) blog on the 1949 television adaptation of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s war memoir Crusade in Europe – to my knowledge the first historical documentary series on U.S. television (and also a chapter of my dissertation Small Screen Histories).

Enjoy!

http://iamhist.net/2018/06/dwight-d-eisenhowers-television-crusade/

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Episode 44 of Inside the Box: Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

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I’ll try to be better about posting each episode of our podcast here. Here’s this week’s episode, in which we take a close look at the 1980s program Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. We discuss cultural and political-economic context of watching the wealthy in the 1980s through today, with asides on developing gourmet culture, conspicuous consumption, and and try to analyze how entertainment media frame representations of wealth and class.

http://www.tvhistorypod.com/?p=896

New SoundingOut Post!

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About a month old at this point, but check out my new post over at SoundingOut! I was in Iceland this June with family, and was struck by the quietness in certain areas of the city – the epidemic noisy construction in others – and thought I’d take a walk with my iPhone recorder on. Enjoy the blog and podcast.

Sounding Out! Podcast #57: The Reykjavik Sound Walk

Visualizing Alternatives to Prose: History, Games, Simulation, and Exploratory Play

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Encouraged by the good showing at the Games panel at AHA 2015 in NYC, I thought I’d share this panel abstract that I am working on for future conferences in which a robust discussion of history and play might be welcome. This is an evolving document certainly, but I look forward to developing it…

History and play. At first these might seem like disparate concepts, evocative of different sets of practices and values. Over the past several decades however, as media producers have continued to supply a stream of historically themed video game titles, and as digital historians have utilized information modeling software to devise novel ways of organizing and analyzing data, it has become apparent that history is no longer the exclusive domain of textual analysis or documentary representation, but an interactive process that can be made to resemble games and play. This capacity of digital software to simulate, order, and reorder data derived from historical sources according to user (player) input likewise suggests alternative ways of making sense of the past that goes beyond the creation of data repositories, or the limitations of static graphical/textual representation. Taking into consideration recent interdisciplinary work in the fields of history, digital humanities, game studies, and information science, this panel assembles a group of interdisciplinary historians who seek to examine the uses and implications of play as a theoretical and methodological approach to digital history.

Recent scholarly analyses of historically themed video games, both as representational texts and pedagogical tools, have provided an entry point for thinking about play and interactivity as a mode of historical engagement. Responding to the commercial success of mass market video games, historians and game studies scholars have sought to move beyond the usual issues of historical (in)accuracy (though critiques of this kind are perhaps well founded), and have begun to examine the ways in which digital simulation invites players to engage with, alter, and recreate the past. As media historian William Urrichio has noted, historically themed computer simulations seem to share postmodernist epistemological goals that seek to disrupt hegemonic systems of historical truth and representation by allowing the user of these technologies agency in constructing (playing) their own narrative. Not restricted to game forms, participants in this panel will examine how a variety of digital technologies, including data mapping and simulations, hypertext games, as well as the more common graphical simulations constitute new ways of creating historical narratives; narratives that take seriously empirical commitments of the historian’s discipline, but which also seek to order, and reorder narratives in ways that emphasize postmodernists contingency of historical knowledge.

Pressing the conception of play beyond familiar ideas of leisure and idle distraction, this panel will examine how digital technologies may be used to facilitate interactive engagements with the past that encourage experimentation, juxtaposition, (re)creativity and gameplay. Panel participants examine a variety of methods by which playfulness with digital tools may offer historians alternative ways of making sense of source texts (data), allowing us to glimpse our sources from different and unexpected angles, and to devise alternatives to linear narratives. This panel seeks to open a conversation about how play, broadly defined, might reveal new ways of creating and imagining our relationship with the past, and how historical play implicates issues of power, affect, representation, and identity.

New Blog Post: The Play of History

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Check out my new(-ish) post over at Play the Past.org on the play of historical interpretation.

The Past is What We Make of It

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For this inaugural post, I want to write a few words about the tagline I’ve affixed to this site: “The Past is What We Make of It.”

The implicit constructivism of this statement is meant to communicate both a theory of historical consciousness and a research agenda.

In the first sense, it is the argument that history is the study of the past as accessed through its traces, rather than a study of the past itself. That is to say, the study of events, persons, and processes that constitute the subject of history have, by definition, “passed,” and so cannot be studied phenomenologically in the same manner as contemporary society or the natural world. History is knowledge constructed from a plenum of documentary evidence, discerned from artifacts, records, texts, and reminiscence.

But even where documents provide us with empirical evidence about historical events or trends, facts do not by themselves constitute the past. Given the privileged position of objectivity and empiricism in our culture, and the putative successes of the sciences in contributing to our understanding of what is both real and true in the world, this may be a contentious statement.

In terms of gaining purchase on historical reality however, documentary evidence presents us with quite limited perspectives on contemporary life and events. While it is true that historical data can, and has, been used to effectively analyze trends, to challenge the deceptions of the powerful, and have contributed toward real change in the world – such as policy research and implementation for instance – facts only serve to describe certain aspects of the past. Facts may be necessary, but may not be sufficient components of historical analysis.

To take an example from American history (be forewarned: as an Americanist, this blog will tend toward my own area of expertise), the detailed inventories and financial records produced by slave traders in the antebellum U.S. south have provided historians with a rich source of factual details about the slave trade. On their own, these “facts” are merely raw data: dates, quantities, prices, age, sex. The intervention of the historian is to processes and interpret this data, to set it alongside other contextualizing data and facts, and to inscribe meaning into that portion of the past they are describing.

This was precisely Walter Johnson’s project in his wonderful book Soul by Soul (1999), which attempts to transform a macro-statistical view of the slave trade into a more intimate, and quite unsettling account based upon letters and narratives written by slaves themselves. Studies that rely too heavily upon the ledgers written by slavers and slave owners tend to freeze out the human experience of slavery. As Johnson writes, “the time-and-space outline of that [slave] trade does not fully describe it. Indeed, it could be said that the daily process by which two million people were bought and sold over the course of the antebellum period has been hidden from historical view by the very aggregations that have been used to represent it.”

Moreover, to rely on documents created by slavers themselves, is to rely on a quite privileged perspective, and which may tend to perpetuate a calculus that reduces human beings to commodities.

Though an historian may refer to a set of primary source documents when she writes about a given historical topic, and though she may marshal supporting facts and evidence, the resulting history is her own interpretive construct. There is not necessarily anything wrong with this. But while facts may be “stubborn things” as John Adams quipped, they can hardly speak for themselves in a meaningful way without being framed and interpreted.

This is not solipsism, nor is it meant to suggest that the past before today did not actually happen as it did, or that there is a moral or qualitative equivalence across historical interpretations (I plan to address these concerns more fully in a future post). Rather it is to acknowledge that there are virtually infinite ways of interpreting and writing about the past – all of which are shaped by the historian living and working in the present, and configured by the pressures, influences, and sensibilities acting upon their interpretations.

‘History,’ and ‘the past,’ are thus separate things. The former is that kind of knowledge work that historians do, typically expressed in written, narrative form. The latter is everything that has happened prior to the present moment – a ponderous category of things and events, which because of its immense and nuanced complexity, cannot ever be fully accounted. To be sure, “history” is our knowledge of the past, but it is not the past itself.

Elaborating this distinction between past/history in his critique Re-thinking History, the philosopher of history Keith Jenkins has explained, “the past has gone and history is what historians make of it when they go to work. History is the labour of historians (and/or those acting as if they were historians).” Jenkins (to whom, along with Hayden White, my understanding of philosophy of history is clearly indebted) argues that historians – and, I would add, anyone else who does historical work – invent concepts and “read” meaning into the past. This reading is the critical point for Jenkins – historians read and re-read, interpret and re-interpret the past. In an empirical sense, the past is something that “seems” to be there in the form of data, facts and dates. What we conceptualize as historical knowledge is more accurately an ensemble of interpretations that is always moving. Often, these interpretations struggle for dominance.

Allen Bennett’s play The History Boys I think provides a good example of how the past can, and has, accommodated a variety of interpretive lenses – including those that have been subordinated or marginalized by dominant readings.

Set in a fictional grammar school in northern England in the 1980s, the play centers around a group of male sixth-form history students studying for university entrance examinations. Toward the end of their preparation, as the boys are becoming confident in the accumulated knowledge of their education, their history teacher Mrs. Littentot cautions the boys that what they have ingested is far from an entirety, but is rather a predominantly masculine perspective that largely ignores the historical experiences of women. Expressing her disenchantment with the “non-gender-oriented basis” on which she is compelled to teach history, Littentot emphasizes to the plainly flush and uncomfortable boys that “history’s not such a frolic for women as it is for men. Why should it be? They never get round the conference table. In 1919, for instance, they just arranged the flowers then gracefully retired. History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with a bucket.”

So much for the “non-gender-oriented” perspective of history, or the putative “view from nowhere.”

Further, Bennett’s dramatized intervention in historiographical debate illustrates the past is not the object of historians alone. Playwrights, filmmakers, cartoonists, television producers, computer game designers, bloggers – a whole raft of cultural producers are engaged with making sense of the past in one way or another.

This brings me to the second meaning invoked by this blog’s tagline, which is meant to refer to my own interest in the particular ways in which historical knowledge is formulated, expressed, and contested. While this is a rather broad range of operation, my research focuses on how history is packaged for consumption within American media culture – and particularly within television, video games, journalism, and user-generated content online.

My vision for this blog is to explore this intersection of history and media in a fun and informal way. It will also be a space to experiment and to develop a number of related discussions about American history and life, and, well, anything at all that will inspire me to keep up a consistent regimen of thought and writing. It is my hope that the result will be productive for me, compelling to whomever wanders into my little garden, and even a bit ludicrous.

Enjoy!