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Motorcycles Book Store > Motorcycles books beginning with P
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The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History |
Author: Tessa Morris-Suzuki
Published: 2005-10-06 |
List price: $35.00
Our price: $26.60
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Public History meets Baudrillard
How is all this information distributed in public history? According to Tessa Morris-Suzuki, in The Past within Us: media, memory, history, "There are two ways in which popular media impinge on this process of attending to varied accounts of the past, and thus on the process of historical truthfulness. First, the media employed shape the memories that are transmitted" and "Second, popular media have the potential to give us access to a diverse range of voices and images of past events; to stand in other's shoes, to see the same event from several different angles." Morris-Suzuki argues that despite predictions of the "death of the past" and the "end of history," the past is within us. Finally, Morris-Suzuki writes, "To understand how knowledge of the past is communicated in an age of mass media, it becomes necessary to understand something of the way in which conventions have been formed, and the way in which they shape the stories that can be told about the past. Each medium has its own history, its own conventions, it's own store of memories. Our understandings of events like the rise of Hitler or the outbreak of the Korean War depend not just on who is telling the story but also on whether we encounter the story in a history textbook, as a historical novel, a collection of photographs, a TV documentary or a feature film." Historical accountability has become a controversial topic both here and abroad. Moreover, as evidenced in Wallace and Loewen , public history has become a profitable product for distribution in the mass markets. Against such a commercialized backdrop, how are public historians supposed handle the elusive problems of "historical truth"? In The Past within Us Morris-Suzuki provided and answer by examining both the question of "truth" and the mass-market appeal by looking at the conundrum historical representation by look squarely at popular media. Evenly using examples from Japanese, American, and European public history, she poses several questions: First, what happens when historical accounts are transported from one medium to another? Second, to what extent does the medium inform (and/or transform) the message? Third, how can public historians use popular media to stir up and expand the history? Morris-Suzuki uses a broad canvas to paint her historical sweep; taking bits from the romances of Walter Scott to the blockbusters Steven Spielberg to Japanese revisionist comic books, Morris-Suzuki takes some of the more significant contemporary popular representations and deliberates on the key potentialities for the delivery of public history in a contemporary space.
Good book
Tessa M-S is a Japan historian from Australia, left-leaning, and a somewhat nuanced thinker. With this book she addresses questions of history-writing or historiography and memory, along with politics in a general way that extrapolates from the postwar Japanese experiences with debates over the "comfort women," Yasukuni shrine, and the rape of Nanjing. Good work.
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