People want to feel close to the past. Traditional, academic history keeps their audience at an arm’s length, talking about the past as cold, distant, and foreign. It’s no wonder then that so many balk at learning history, especially the history that many people have been taught growing up – predominately the stories of rich, male WASPs. Instead, most people engage with history through popular media like movies, TV shows, and online resources.
In her book Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge, Alison Landsberg argues that scholars should take the historical work being undertaken outside of the confines of the ivory tower more seriously and acknowledge popular media’s capability to foster historical thinking, build historical knowledge AND engage a larger audience.
Historians know the importance of placing oneself in the shoes of a historical figure, considering the alternative courses of action and the confines of experience built up by the context of the time. This practice helps shake us out of the false notion that the events of history were inevitable, meant to be.
Popular media helps bring this mindset to the broader public. Audio-visual formats engage not just sight and sound, but all the senses. We physically recoil hearing screams of pain and feel the tension of a suspenseful moment in our bodies. We even imagine the stench of dung-laden city streets or a military field hospital and the taste of elaborate meals set out before kings.
Through a movie, TV show, or even an exhibit (physical or virtual), we feel almost like we have stepped into a completely different historical moment. Viewers get a better sense of the justifications for why certain decisions were made, why people lived the way they lived, and why we are where we are now.
This phenomenon, that touches the emotions and guides viewers to create their own personal meaning out of history, is called affective engagement. Landsberg pinpoints affective engagement as the reason why popular media formats are so effective at engaging audiences with the past, giving them a personal stake in history, and even stoking political consciousness.
The most successful of these popular endeavors do not allow the viewer to seamlessly slip into the past. Instead, they hammer in the point that all history is mediated – narrated and passed down by biased sources. We can never relive the past. This moment of cognitive dissonance when we mentally flit back and forth between past and present is when we start thinking historically and build historical knowledge.
Throughout her book, Landsberg illustrates her theory by citing examples of films, television shows, and online exhibits that masterfully utilize affective engagement to foment historical consciousness.
Milk brings the previously little-known story of a gay politician to the forefront of the public consciousness, and mediates the story through Harvey Milk’s own words, days before his assassination. Unlike many other films that came before it, it also serves to humanize LGBTQ Americans, treating their stories as worthwhile, rather than treating them as the butt of a joke or, worse, a sinful abomination. This film shone a bright light on the LGBTQ+ rights movement, which had not been covered seriously and respectfully in the public sphere.
Television shows take affective engagement a step further, as their serial format can point out historical inconsistencies and change over time and tend to avoid a teleological narrative that wraps the events of history up in a tight bow. Even with lush, seductive recreations of a time period, like in Mad Men, historically conscious dramas are rife with moments that pull the audience out of the reverie and make them contend with modern day issues that have roots in the past and shatter historical myths.
In Mad Men, the causal racism spewed so easily by the show’s main characters jars viewers and makes them understand the racism of the time better. African Americans get little thought from people like Don and Betty Draper, except when Don is trying to sell them something or Betty’s domestic servant puts dinner on the table for her kids. I remember being taught in school that scenes of the brutal crackdown on the Civil Rights movement galvanized people in the North to support the end of segregation. However, Mad Men shows that people like the Drapers didn’t think it was any of their business – it was a Black problem, a problem for Southerners.
Museums also use affective engagement as a tool to bring their visitors closer to history, to help them making meaning out of our shared past. From the dawn of the digital age, museums have made efforts to transfer the museum experience online, creating new avenues of engagement. This is even more relevant today, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The examples Landsberg gives – the Anne Frank House’s Secret Annex Online and the US Holocaust Museum’s Kristallnacht experience on Second Life – are incredible examples of how museums can create entirely new experiences online and reach broader audiences.
I’ll end with this quote from a visitor to the exhibit on Second Life –
“I was at the DC Holocaust Museum last year, and hate to say – the noise and crowds somewhat diminished the powerful of this for me. But this, at my own pace, in my own space – wow.”
pg. 173
This quote to me shows the promise of online exhibitions and the power of affective engagement.
We can’t expect every visitor or audience member to learn and engage in the same way. Offering up different experiences for different learners is the best way we can invite people into what we have to offer so that they can learn from history and make their own meanings that they can take forward with them.
MUSEUM MUSINGS 
I like your last point, Lindsay, about how audience members no learning and engaging all in the same way. Really, the museum approach has the advantage over the academic approach because it allows them to engage in more than one way.
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That’s a well said last paragraph! To expect every individual to be able to engage with history, which can be totally (or literally) foreign to some, is naive and unreasonable.While every museum have the disadvantage of expecting a certain amount of education from their visitors, television of movies offer a much easier to digest narrative. However, I do believe that museums provide the most enriching, hands-on approach to history, as nothing compares to having real, physical artifacts to put history into context.
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