[et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ admin_label=”section”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_post_title admin_label=”Titolo del Post” title=”on” meta=”on” author=”off” date=”off” categories=”on” comments=”off” featured_image=”on” featured_placement=”below” parallax_effect=”off” parallax_method=”on” text_orientation=”left” text_color=”dark” text_background=”off” text_bg_color=”rgba(255,255,255,0.9)” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid” title_font=”|on||on|” meta_font_size=”20″ meta_text_color=”#e09900″ title_font_size=”35px” \/][et_pb_text admin_label=”Testo” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”]<\/p>\n
Washington D.C., 4 luglio 1976. Foto di Jim Rhodes<\/a>, pubblicata su Flickr con licenza CC 2.0<\/a> [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”Testo” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”Testo” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”]<\/p>\n History Comes Alive. Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s<\/em> <\/p>\n In History Comes Alive<\/em>, M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska describes the pivotal change in the perception of the \u00a0 occurred in American popular culture during the 1970s. In the author\u2019s perspective this new attitude towards history was highlighted and boosted by \u00a0the Bicentennial celebrations.<\/p>\n In face of \u00a0the well-known references in 1970s\u2019 media, cultural institutions and fashion to the 1950s, the Progressive Era and the Colonial period, Rymsza-Pawlowska originally tries to point out what actually changed in the \u00a0popular relationship with the past, comparing it especially with the prevailing one in the 1960s. In the 1970s, unlike some years before – when historical events were seen as distant, unvarying and sometimes read as model experiences to learn from, the past\u00a0 came forward \u00a0through feelings, tales of common people\u2019s lives and a lively interaction with the present day. In the 1970s, history is not \u00a0just informational: it \u00a0becomes emotional.<\/p>\n In the framework of US cultural history, Rymsza-Pawlowska\u2019s work greatly supports the literature\u2019s trend reevaluating the 1970s as a culturally multifaceted period marked by a grassroots activism on a community base. Unlike \u00a0the dismissing judgements of 1970s as \u201cme decade\u201d or narcissistic triumph expressed by the cultural critics of the same period (Wolfe, Lasch, Bell), Rymsza-Pawlowska accepts the postmodernist assumption of a spread disenchantment towards the future – as opposed \u00a0to the wishful believes prompted by the 1960s\u2019social movements and state policies – and pushes her analysis further. She claims that the 1970s\u2019 popular culture and politics also contributed to revise the US interest in the past bringing forward plenty of innovations. She chooses to analyze self-consciously \u201chistorical\u201d media and events to better understand those developments. As a consequence, each chapter is dedicated to a different cultural platform through which the sense of history\u00a0 has been disseminated in the 1970s: television (chapter 1), state and federal Bicentennial celebrations (chapters 2, 6), museums and exhibitions (chapters 3, 4) and reenactments (chapter 5).<\/p>\n In order to contextualize her thesis, the author retraces the long-standing history of diverse public history practices: preservation and conservation in museums, oral history, reenactment, collecting present day ephemera to build invented archives of everyday life, sensory engagement as exhibition tool, living history museum, etc. This extends the scope of the book towards a broad overview\u00a0 of the public history\u2019s development, connecting the larger focus on the 1970s \u00a0with some cultural and political turning points from the late XIX to the early 1980s.<\/p>\n Moreover, \u00a0the author especially stresses how US institutional power used public history in the 1960s and 1970s. She provides a detailed archival reconstruction of the work of the two federal agencies dedicated to the Bicentennial celebrations\u2014the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC) and the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA)\u2014,from the Johnson\u2019s to the Ford\u2019s administrations, connecting their work \u00a0with the changing popular attitude towards the past. Rymsza-Pawlowska pays special attention \u00a0to the \u00a0raising concern of grass-roots organizations over Bicentennial celebrations, especially the People\u2019s Bicentennial Commission led by Jeremy Rifkin. They aimed at saving the populist\u2019s and minorities\u2019 perspective on the public narrative of US history and exposing through the anniversary their strong criticism to \u00a0Nixon\u2019s and Ford\u2019s administrations.<\/p>\n In 1970s, the usable past clearly became a bone of contention between the Establishment and the social movements. However, \u00a0the author does not elaborate further \u00a0such a critical concept in historical knowledge and in building public history practices.<\/p>\n Indeed, in the monograph, public history as a scientific research field \u00a0remains on the sidelines, despite the fact that its \u00a0founding moment is conventionally dated back to 1978, when the US journal \u201cThe Public Historian\u201d was launched. The author actually mentions the changing attitude of academic historical research between the late 1960s and the early 1970s as an output of the 1960s social movements. She makes reference to the raise of \u201cNew History\u201d and the attention since early 1970s to the social history and the histories of ethnic and sexual minorities. Nevertheless an answer is still lacking in History Comes Alive<\/em>: it can\u2019t be that the academic interest in public history in the late 1970s was a sort of response to the popular turn towards the emotional interpretation of the past of the same decade? Maybe another research should follow this query, since Rymsza-Pawlowska legitemately let the scholars movements outside from her inquire.<\/p>\n Thanks to \u201cHistory Comes Alive\u201d the developments of some self-consciously \u201chistorical\u201d events and products stand out as a successful methodological key to figure out a comprehensive image of the 1970s popular culture in U.S. and this is a very valuable achievement in the current historiographical revision of such a critical decade.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Prima #popreview in lingua inglese per PopHistory! “History Comes Alive. Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s”, di M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1914,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[65,111],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\n<\/strong><\/p>\ndi Marta Gara
\n<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n(M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, The North Carolina University Press, Chapel Hill, 2017)<\/p>\n