Those who study history as a field of knowledge production (like myself) often differ in their understanding of what it is from the general public. Much of the public views history as entertainment or a boring list of names and dates, not anything critical to modern life. In some cases, its positioned as a mode of predicting what will most certainly come next. Historians tend to view history as more dynamic and in flux depending on the present. But where do perceptions of the past between the two groups diverge and is there a danger in that divergence?
I would argue that the difference is in how more popular perceptions understand the past as dead while those engaged in knowledge production view it as alive, speaking to us, demanding our attention to rethink the world around us. That disconnect is fed by popular historical narratives found in nationalist, teleological histories and by mass mediated narratives in film and television. For many, history is something back there, not something that informs us in the here and now. As such, the public is missing out on the power that understanding history in a more holistic way can hold. That does cause real problems as history for most isn’t something that is fully real nor something that can shape our understanding of what’s possible in the world.
Popular perceptions of the past rests in two ideas, that of inevitability of events of the past and the second is the objectification or flattening of the past. First, popular historical narratives tend to rest on the idea of a singular, teleological narrative, either progressive or sometimes cyclical, such as in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. What happened, happened and that’s just fate. Nationalist historical narratives tend to embrace that framing along a continuum from liberal to fascist. The “nation” in these histories are an inevitable outcome of history or a body that has always existed in the past and will into the future. Messier aspects of the past are ignored or glossed over. Let’s take US history and the rise of modernity. Modern liberalism is seen as the inevitable outcome of the Enlightenment – a direct line from one to the other and the only real outcome that matters. The modern nation-state is an inevitable outcome of the historical process of the Enlightenment, in other words.