Popular history, also called pop history, is a broad genre of historiography that takes a popular approach, aims at a wide readership, and usually emphasizes narrative, personality and vivid detail over scholarly analysis. The term is used in contradistinction to professional academic or scholarly history writing which is usually more specialized and technical and thus less accessible to the general reader.
Conceptualizations
It is proposed that popular history is a "moral science" in the sense that recreates the past not only for its own sake but also to underscore how history could facilitate an ethically responsible present.[1] Some view it as history produced by authors who are better interlocutors capable of translating the language of scientificity to ordinary everyday language.[2]
Some scholars partly attributed the development of popular history to the increase of writers-turned-historians such as Benson Lossing, David Pae, and Mary Botham Howitt,[globalize] who wrote historical events "in good style" and, thus, more appealing to the public.[1]
Popular historians
Some popular historians are without academic affiliation while others are academics, or former academics, who have (according to one writer) "become somehow abstracted from the academic arena, becoming cultural commentators."[3] Many worked as journalists, perhaps after taking an initial degree in history. Popular historians may become nationally renowned or best-selling authors and may or may not serve the interests of particular political viewpoints in their roles as "public historians". Many authors of "official histories" and "authorized biographies" would qualify as popular historians serving the interests of particular institutions or public figures.
Popular historians aim to appear on the "general lists" of general publishers, rather than the university presses that have dominated academic publishing in recent years. Increasingly, popular historians have taken to television where they are able, often accompanying a series of documentaries with a tie-in book.
English-Canadian writers of popular histories include journalists Pierre Berton and Peter C. Newman, humourist Will Ferguson, folklorist and pulp fiction writer Thomas P. Kelley, and television presenter Patrick Watson. François-Xavier Garneau was the leading historian in nineteenth century French Canada from outside the academy. Polemicists in the national unity debate have also written influentially about Canadian history, notably militant Pierre Vallières and journalist Normand Lester critiquing the Canadian state and novelist Mordecai Richler critiquing Quebec nationalist historians as anti-Semitic. Notably, Canada has produced several writers who have written popular histories of specific ethnic communities, including Ken McGoogan (Scots and Irish), Myrna Kostash (Ukrainians), etc.
^ abPfitzer, Gregory M. (2008). Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, 1840-1920. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. pp. 40, 41. ISBN978-1-55849-625-5.
^Korte, Barbara; Paletschek, Sylvia (2014-03-31). Popular History Now and Then: International Perspectives. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. p. 17. ISBN978-3-8376-2007-8.
^Heinen, Sandra; Sommer, Roy (2009-09-04). Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. p. 228. ISBN978-3-11-022242-5.