Groot Jerome de. Consuming History. Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture

Routledge, 2009. — 305 p. — ISBN 978-0-415-39946-3In recent years, history has been described variously as the new rock’n’roll, the new gardening or the new cookery. There is currently a voracious audience for all things historical: cultural histories, celebrity historians, historical novels, star-studded historical f i lms, TV drama, documentaries and reality shows, as well as cultural events and historical re-enactments. Non-academic history – ‘public history’ – is a complex, dynamic entity which impacts on the popular understanding of the past at all levels.
In Consuming History, Jerome de Groot examines how society consumes history and how a reading of this consumption can help us understand popular culture and issues of representation. This book analyses a wide range of cultural entities – from computer games to daytime television, from blockbuster f i ctional narratives such as The Da Vinci Code to DNA genealogical tools – to consider how history works in contemporary popular culture.
Jerome de Groot probes how museums have responded to the heritage debate and the way in which new technologies have brought about a shift in access to history, from online gameplaying to internet genealogy. He discusses the often conf l ictual relationship between ‘public’ and academic history, and raises important questions about the theory and practice of history as a discipline.
Consuming History is an important and engaging analysis of the social con-sumption of history and of fers an essential path through the debates for readers interested in history, cultural studies and the media.