Performing Public History: Case Studies in Historical Storytelling
Performing Public History explores history-telling as a performance across a wide range of media, including theatre and film, historical re-enactments and living history performances, operas, and video games.

Taking historians as storytellers, this book illustrates how the choices they make shape historical meaning. While historians may strive to be objective when they research and write the past, they inevitably draw on their imagination, emotions, and creativity, aligning them with others who make history in public. The book explores issues such as the nature of archives, realism, fact and fiction, accuracy and authenticity, and actants and audiences. It draws on case studies from all parts of the world, offering global perspectives that invite a rethinking about what history is, and how and why we do it. Sharing work by graduate students, the author also offers an appendix of classroom exercises that instructors will find valuable.

Written accessibly for students, this volume offers a succinct account of the discipline of history, the field of public history, and how performance is a useful concept for thinking about history work.

1146502904
Performing Public History: Case Studies in Historical Storytelling
Performing Public History explores history-telling as a performance across a wide range of media, including theatre and film, historical re-enactments and living history performances, operas, and video games.

Taking historians as storytellers, this book illustrates how the choices they make shape historical meaning. While historians may strive to be objective when they research and write the past, they inevitably draw on their imagination, emotions, and creativity, aligning them with others who make history in public. The book explores issues such as the nature of archives, realism, fact and fiction, accuracy and authenticity, and actants and audiences. It draws on case studies from all parts of the world, offering global perspectives that invite a rethinking about what history is, and how and why we do it. Sharing work by graduate students, the author also offers an appendix of classroom exercises that instructors will find valuable.

Written accessibly for students, this volume offers a succinct account of the discipline of history, the field of public history, and how performance is a useful concept for thinking about history work.

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Performing Public History: Case Studies in Historical Storytelling

Performing Public History: Case Studies in Historical Storytelling

by David Dean
Performing Public History: Case Studies in Historical Storytelling

Performing Public History: Case Studies in Historical Storytelling

by David Dean

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Overview

Performing Public History explores history-telling as a performance across a wide range of media, including theatre and film, historical re-enactments and living history performances, operas, and video games.

Taking historians as storytellers, this book illustrates how the choices they make shape historical meaning. While historians may strive to be objective when they research and write the past, they inevitably draw on their imagination, emotions, and creativity, aligning them with others who make history in public. The book explores issues such as the nature of archives, realism, fact and fiction, accuracy and authenticity, and actants and audiences. It draws on case studies from all parts of the world, offering global perspectives that invite a rethinking about what history is, and how and why we do it. Sharing work by graduate students, the author also offers an appendix of classroom exercises that instructors will find valuable.

Written accessibly for students, this volume offers a succinct account of the discipline of history, the field of public history, and how performance is a useful concept for thinking about history work.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780367775360
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Publication date: 04/08/2025
Series: Global Perspectives on Public History
Pages: 200
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Dean is Distinguished Research Professor and Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Carleton University, Canada. He has published widely in the field of public history, including A Companion to Public History (2018). He is the co-editor of International Public History, the journal of the International Federation for Public History.

Table of Contents

1. History, Public History, Performance 2. The Truth About Archives 3. Performing the Real 4. Feeling the Past 5. Authentic Performances 6. “The Cat Ate My Bannock” and Other Stories Epilogue: Performing Public History Appendix: Classroom Activities

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