The Historian as VIP

March/April 2007 Historically Speaking 41 The Historian as VIP1 Daniel Snowman H istoriane are Very Important People. Some of them, anyway. Let me explain why. History is everywhere, or so it seemed as we entered our new millennium. On television Pyramids and Puritans, Hitler and Stalin, war epics and costume dramas josded to fill the airwaves and garner large audiences on a plethora of popular channels. Visitor numbers to museums, galleries, and heritage sites burgeoned while a raft of new historical magazines sprouted. In the bookshops, sales of biographies and war books almost rivaled those on how to enhance your corporate, coital, or culinary competence, and the "qualipop" press mined new gold with daily stories purporting to show how recendy discovered historical documents threw new (often contentious ) light upon historical personalities, artifacts, and events. Family and local history flourished, while monarchs and emperors, presidents , popes, and premiers were pressed to apologize for the actions of their predecessors several generations or even centuries before. Journalists, with their penchant for catchy labels, have dubbed history "the new rock 'n' roll" and "the new gardening" (and even "the new sex"). Let's not overstate the case. History isn't any of those things and has probably never been quite tiiat popular! But there's no doubt: history sells—not just to a cultured elite but, nowadays, to a mass market. The past may be a foreign country; but by the early 21st century, history, it seemed, was inescapable. Or was it? Was the succession of sensational press stories new gold or fools' gold? Was the demand for historical apology a serious attempt to come to terms with the past or a form of crude (and often financially fueled) gesture politics? Did radio and television programs or the opening up of Heritage sites provide a genuine sense of continuity between past and present or an anesthetized dieme park, fun to experience but nothing to do with us? Our age, many argue, is one that lives in an immediate present, obsessed with die new, die fashionable, with little awareness of the ways our living present derives from its continuity with all that has preceded it. The point was not lost on historians. "Most young men and women," wrote a disgrunded Eric Hobsbawm, "grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in." We live, said David Cannadine, in "a society * This article is an edited version of the introduction to Daniel Snowman 's book Historians, just published by Palgrave Macmillan. which is increasingly amnesiac and ahistorical." So: is an interest in history in the ascendant? Or, per contra, do we live in an age singularly bereft of historical awareness? Could bodi be true? A WPA Poster announcing a reenactment of the Lincoln-Douglas debate. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZC2-5233]. Perhaps there is no mystery and we are simply talking about different groups of people: those who are more interested in history and diose who are less so. Evidence from book sales, televisionaudience and Heritage-visitor research, and the like suggests diat people expressing an interest in the past tend to be older, better educated, and wealdiier than die average. Since the population of most Western societies contains more and more elderly people with disposable time and income dian ever before, an overall increase in the consumption of history would seem almost inevitable. Against diat, however, is the fact that it is the younger generation , not the oldies widi time and money on dieir hands, who are most at home with diat miraculous modern gateway to local and family history, the computer, while cheap travel enables even youngsters with limited resources to visit such hitherto remote exotica as Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu. The historical reenactment societies that have sprouted like hydra heads succeed in recruiting plenty of young enthusiasts keen to learn what it was like living as a Cavalier or a Roundhead, a Yankee or a Confederate. Yet these are the same youngsters who, in other aspects of their lives, are preoccupied widi the transient and the fashionable . While there is a plethora of...