Reconstructing the Past

History in the Mass Media 1890–2005

Sian Nicholas, Tom O'Malley, Kevin Williams

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415425315
• eBook ISBN: 9781317996835
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together a team of history and media researchers from across Britain and Europe, this volume provides readers with a themed discussion of the range and variety of the media's engagement with history, and a close study of the relationship between media, history and national identity.

INTRODUCTION¹

Tom O’Malley

Studying the relationship between the media and the way it represents history raises a wide range of issues.² The representation of history in forms of communication has been with us since humans began to communicate through language, pictures and writing. All cultures have used media of communication to articulate versions of divine and secular history for a variety of ends. This collection focuses on aspects of one phase of that history of historical representations in the media, that associated with twentieth-century Europe including the Soviet Union. It deals with the dominant media of that period, newspapers, films, radio and television. This introduction offers some comments on the wider historical context in which the papers published here might be considered, and comments on some of the wider issues they raise.

Some Context

Oral communications, in the form of storytelling, poetry and song were, for much of human history, the most common way of transmitting accounts of the past (Ong). In the ancient world and in medieval Europe, forms of communication included both the oral and the material, such as tablets, architecture, icons, church paintings, papyrus and vellum. In societies where only a very few select groups could read and write, the visual dimensions of communications, in objects and ceremonies were centrally important. Alongside the everyday nature of communications were assumptions about the legitimacy of the social and political order, rooted, as in the case of the Old and New Testaments, in selective accounts of the divine and secular history of the world.³

With the advent of print, accounts of the past embedded in official publications, religious and secular books, pamphlets, ballads and handbills could be fixed and disseminated in greater numbers than had handwritten manuscripts. Printed artefacts also had a pronounced visual dimension through the use of woodcuts in pamphlets, ballads, handbills and books. As a consequence, printed accounts of the past could be deliberated on and contested (Eisenstein). In sixteenth-century England the Henrician Reformation was accompanied by an officially organized effort to rewrite the history of the English Church using preambles to statutes, plays and pamphlets. In this official account the Church was portrayed as having been ‘always and essentially nationalist, erastian and self-sufficient, independent and exceptional in character, vitally different and separate from the rest of Europe’ (Jones 20, 58–59). In the British Isles, the political and religious conflicts of the Civil War (1642–49) were fuelled by ideas about the past, such as the myth of the Norman Yoke. In this myth the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of England had been ‘free and equal citizens, governing themselves through representative institutions’ prior to the Norman Conquest of 1066. Thereafter, they had been ‘deprived of their liberty’ and had fought to recover it against successive kings. This version of the past was fixed and transmitted in pamphlet and other printed forms in the seventeenth century (Hill ‘Norman’ 64). So too were the versions of divine and secular national and international history which fed a range of argument and debate prior to and beyond the Civil War, and which gained their currency through printed interpretations of printed copies of the Bible (Hill Bible).

The slow development in Europe of modern historical writing in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a form concerned with accuracy, archival research and critical approaches to evidence, was accompanied by the emergence of history as a profession (Bentley). At the same time, from at least the nineteenth century onwards, and earlier in some cases, print and pageantry were used by governments and their opponents, with only selective concern for accuracy, to cultivate the idea of unified national identity.⁴ The Victorians’ understanding of Oliver Cromwell was forged not only through the work of historians such as S.R. Gardiner, but through the medium of popular newspapers, paintings, fiction, stained glass windows and statues (Worden 243–315; Melman). Indeed, although scholarly work on the past has always been shaped by the political and social assumptions of historians (Jones; Kenyon), popular versions of history circulating in print culture (O’Malley, Allan and Thompson), architecture (Cannadine ‘Parliament’) and in visual form in the twentieth century, bore – as this collection illustrates – only a tangential relationship to reasonably objective accounts of the past. Thus history, since its development as a separate profession, has coexisted with the popularization of the past in a variety of media over which the historian has not, in general, been able to wield much direct influence.⁵

The emergence of a mass press, of cinema, radio and television in the twentieth century allowed for a much wider and more rapid dissemination of ideas. This, arguably, marginalized, if it did not completely replace, oral transmission. Cinema for example, helped to both fix and spread simplified accounts of English history (Richards 257–72) and accounts of the experience of the First World War (1914–18) which restricted ‘the memory of the war to a few recurring images’ (Sorlin 24).⁶ In Wales, the experience of the creation of a unitary broadcasting system helped to cement the modern sense of Wales as a nation with its own unique traditions (Davies).

Complex Processes

A superficial sketch such as this is only intended to point to the sweep and complexity of the issues associated with studying history in the media. It reminds us, as Simon Schama has pointed out, that the transmission of ‘history … has not been purely co-eval with the printed text’. We should, he argues, avoid ‘the triple mistake that print is deep, images are shallow; that print actively argues and images passively illustrate’ (Schama 20, 23). It points to the complex relationship between history as produced by historians working within commonly accepted rules about evidence, accuracy and the critical use of sources, and the past as it gets transmitted orally, through churches, the press, books, photography, voice recordings, films, radio, television and the Internet, and also of the importance of attending to the latter.⁷ This, in turn, suggests that, in order to grasp the complexities of the social processes being studied, it is necessary to draw on as wide a range of relevant cultural and social theory, as do Conboy, Ebbrecht, Pickering and Keightley in this collection.⁸

The papers in this collection, then, deal with the ways in which the media constitute places where accounts of the past are represented and how, in some instances, these representations relate to the lives of individuals, but more broadly to their relationship to wider social and political issues. Kevin Williams touches on some of the ways in which these issues have arisen in the UK in the context of debates around the presentation of history on television. His contribution illustrates that understanding the changing conditions under which television history is produced is central to understanding the kind of representations that appear on screens. His account illustrates how a great deal of recent discussion about the media and history has focused on television and cinema in particular. This collection broadens the perspective to include radio, photography and the press.

The question of intention comes to the fore in almost all of the pieces. The political motives behind producing a film about the events of 1917 in Russia under the intimidating oversight of Stalin in Judith Devlin’s contribution testifies to the belief amongst ruling groups that how contemporary history is represented is of the utmost importance. More indirectly, Jill Craigie’s motives in making Blue Scar combined the artistic and the political from a position of political commitment on the left of UK politics. As Gwenno Ffrancon’s paper indicates, the film acts as both a testimony to an intervention at the time, a commentary on contemporary history and, now, as a historical document in its own right. In these cases cinema was used to construct particular, politically motivated accounts of contemporary history.

In other areas more indirect processes were at work. The comedic intent of the UK BBC TV series, Dad’s Army, discussed by Corinna Peniston-Bird, had the unintended consequence of associating the historically complex experience of the Home Guard in the Second World War (1939–45), with the image of a well meaning, aged and incompetent Dad’s Army, a popular association reinforced by the ways in which the term ‘Dad’s Army’ was subsequently used by newspapers. The programme’s engagement with popular memory of the Home Front in the Second World War became generalized to represent something which was often at variance with the remembered experience of members of the Home Guard. This contribution also provides an illustration of the ways in which popular accounts of the past can be transformed as elements are picked up, adjusted and re-circulated in media other than those in which they first appeared. Sian Nicholas’s account of the fictional recreation of the Second World War in the TV programme Foyle’s War (ITV, 2002–08) further illustrates and develops the question of how the memory of an event like the Second World War is negotiated in TV drama. In this context TV drama series can function as an intelligent method of exploring, and even directly challenging, popular and academic perspectives on the Home Front. Martin Conboy’s theoretically oriented account of tabloid representations of the memorialization of the ‘D-Day’ landings of 1944, illustrates how sections of the media mobilized popular images of the war to cement their relationships with their readers. In both cases, television and the newspapers were selectively repackaging memories of the recent past. In none of these examples was the dissemination of an accurate account of the past the main purpose, yet this did not prevent them having wide circulation via the numbers viewing comedy or drama on TV or reading popular newspaper references to Dad’s Army and stories about ‘D-Day’.

Tobias Ebbrecht’s account of historical event-television in Germany echoes the issues raised by Sian Nicholas and illustrates the ways in which the media selects elements of the recent past in the service of contemporary concerns. Here the focus is on the way in which drama programmes were linked to wider shifts in the ways in which German society engaged with the historical meaning of the Second World War. Unlike Dad’s Army, Foyle’s War or the tabloid versions of ‘D-Day’, this kind of television is not a simple, if unsatisfactory, recapitulation or renegotiation of experience, it appears to be more closely related to the role of television in giving an account of a traumatic period in recent history to a nation still involved in settling accounts with its own past.

The ways in which representations of recent history collide with personal memories, hinted at in Tobias Ebbrecht’s contribution, are further explored in Richard Rudin’s account of the re-enactment of the pirate radio experience of the 1960s in 2004, and Pickering and Keightley’s exploration of the theoretical issues raised by the experience of photographic and phonographic memorialization. Richard Rudin points to how the BBC Radio Essex weekend revisiting the pirate experience effectively presented the history of pirate radio as an exercise in nostalgia rather than the serious challenge to 1960s broadcasting that it was. Nostalgic responses to the re-enactment were forthcoming as were more romantic responses from younger people, for whom the pirates were not part of their lived experience. If anything the whole process illustrated how important the address to the personal and to personal experience is in modern radio and to the appeal of remembering the events of the immediate past.

The issue of remembering is also the focus of Pickering and Keightley’s contribution. Using cultural theory, they conceive of music recordings and photography as ‘vehicles of remembering’ stimuli for individuals to connect, albeit briefly, with a past that can be simultaneously intimate and distant. They point, as do the contributions by Corinna Peniston-Bird and Richard Rudin, to the ways in which representations of the past play a role in the individual experience of viewers and listeners. The relationship between the individual and the collective experience of popular representations is an area, where evidence allows, that can provide valuable insights into way various media portray the past.

This collection illustrates a selection of ways in which the media and the past can be explored, using a variety of empirical and theoretical tools. The contributions provide evidence of how media representations of the past emerge and how they relate over time to individuals and the societies in which they circulate. They illustrate also how print and the visual influence each other in generating and circulating popular representations of the past.

They also point to how important the visual remains as a way of transmitting information, especially as, since the 1920s, the modern tabloid newspaper has made intensive use of graphics and photography in response to the rise of cinema and television (LeMahieu). If nothing else the contemporary dominance of visual communications in culture and politics should remind historians of its importance as a means of embedding meaning in societies over time.

Although this collection has focused on specific films, programmes and forms, perhaps the most important role of history in the media is the way it has, and continues to be, woven into the very fabric of the media. History is, arguably, ever present in the content of the media, in ways that are both noteworthy (the special TV programme) and, more often, ways that are not (assumptions about the nation, about recent social and political history in film, TV, print, radio and other forms of communication). Finally, there can be little doubt that social memory and the conditions under which social change occurs, are linked to the ways in which people understand their past as well as to the press of immediate circumstances. Studying the relationships between the ways the media have represented the past to societies is one way of helping us understand more fully the forces shaping social change across societies and over time.

Notes

1. The author would like to thank Sian Nicholas and Kevin Williams for their helpf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Flattened Visions from Timeless Machines: History in the Mass Media
• 3. Recreating ‘History’ on Film: Stalin and the Russian Revolution in Feature Film, 1937–39
• 4. ‘The Same Old Firm Dressed Up in a New Suit’: Blue Scar (Craigie, 1949) and the Portrayal of the Nationalization of the Coal Industry
• 5. ‘I Wondered Who’d be the First to Spot That’: Dad’s Army at War, in the Media and in Memory
• 6. History, Revisionism and Television Drama: Foyle’s War and the ‘Myth of 1940’
• 7. History, Public Memory and Media Event: Codes and Conventions of Historical Event-Television in Germany
• 8. Revisiting the Pirates
• 9. A Tale of Two Battles: History in the Popular Press
• 10. Echoes and Reverberations: Photography and Phonography as Historical Forms
• Index