History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s by M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska (review)

History Comes Alive offers the most comprehensive study to date of the relationship between Americans and history during the decade of the 1970s. Adding to the rapidly growing historiography of the 1976 bicentennial, and framing contemporary public engagement with the past within a new interpretation that clarifies how and why the seventies represent a watershed moment for public history, the book is essential reading for serious scholars of intellectual, cultural, and public history.

The heart of the book consists of the five chapters (two through six) that creatively analyze the popular engagements with history during the bicentennial years from multiple angles. Chapter two closely follows the national commissions and related politics during the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations, as the official celebration shifted from national and partisan, to grassroots and politically dynamic. Much of this story has been told before, recently by Tammy Gordon, but Rymsza-Pawlowska's articulation of how shifts at the national political level reflected cultural shifts related to history builds to something new as she continues the narrative into the more explicative chapters that follow. Chapter three describes how accepted principles of preservation underwent a radical transformation that resulted in significantly less veneration of extraordinary historical artifacts, but also an increasing recognition of the ordinary and near-contemporary. Chapter four studies four distinct museum spaces to persuasively argue that contemporary public history professionals also rejected the centrality of artifacts and embraced immersive and emotional experiences as the new goal. The argument develops further in chapter five, which explores popular reenactments connected with the bicentennial, from the Wagon Train to a transcontinental "bike-centennial," and drives home the point that contemporary Americans sought to experience the lives of ordinary people of the past and remake history's foreignness into something more familiar. Chapter six shows how activists used this growing historical engagement to press their fellow citizens to think critically about how commemorated historical events and ideas challenged complacency in the present.

Given the strength of the later chapters, it is doubly unfortunate that the book begins, following an introduction, with its weakest chapter, which covers history on television from the 1950s through the 1970s. The presentation of Roots and Little House on the Prairie is fine, if not groundbreaking, but the discussion of earlier programming is riddled with errors and the arguments are marred by inexplicable omissions. Claims about the dearth of historically-themed TV shows during the 1950s and early 1960s collapse because she neglects to even mention (much less explain) hugely popular programs like Gunsmoke (fiction) and Cavalcade of America (non-fiction, and precisely the sort of narrative non-fiction show she avers did not appear until the 1970s). Similarly, using Disney's Tomorrowland and modernist architecture as proof that Americans of the 1950s ignored the past, while eliding contrary evidence including Disney's Frontier-land or Main Street, or the popularity of "colonial" suburban design, discredits the project. Her description of You Are There is objectively wrong and ignores the leftist interpretations of history offered by the blacklisted communist writers of most of the series' episodes. Innovations she attributes to 1970s programs, such as historical characters speaking directly to the camera, were pioneered by You Are There in the early 1950s. Both that series and Cavalcade were promoted and distributed through the nation's schools, but she argues that ABC's similar promotion of Roots a generation later indicates television's newly radical assertiveness regarding authentic historical representation. Citations for this chapter reflect limited engagement with the extensive literature on early television, which may explain the deficiencies. Moreover, this chapter seemed superfluous.

With the exception of chapter two, her primary argument is consistently supported throughout the book. There were missed opportunities for comparisons across time: the brief mentions of the bicentennial Freedom Train and other programs like "USA Redirected" and "Heritage...