Consuming History

Jerome de Groot teaches at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Remaking History (2015), The Historical Novel (2009), Royalist Identities (2004), and numerous articles on popular history, manuscript culture and the English civil war.

"De Groot provides all students and practitioners of history with a fascinating overview of the diverse ways in which history is used by societies, and a nuanced understanding of both the rewards and challenges involved with representing the past to the public… The author’s intellectual engagement with these topics is untouched by other publications."Michael F. Dove, University of Western Ontario, Canada"This is the only book that seriously addresses the relationship between history and popular culture in Britain today, and does so in an engaging, thoughtful and accessible way… the range of coverage in Consuming History is excellent."Catherine Fletcher, University of Sheffield, UK"This empirically rich, well-documented book surveys an impressively wide range of topics that the author divides into six often overlapping categories. De Groot (Univ. of Manchester, UK) concentrates heavily on the British experience and, in this second edition of a book first published in 2009, offers new topics, updated examples, and revised analyses. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."D. L. LeMahieu, Lake Forest College, USA, CHOICE Reviews

• List of figures. Acknowledgements. Preface to the Second Edition. Introduction. Part 1: The Popular Historian 1. The public historian, the historian in public. 2. Popular history in print. 3. The historian in popular culture. Part 2: Digital History 4. Genealogy and family history. 5. History online. Part 3: Performing and playing history. 6. Historical re-enactment. 7. Performing pastness, recycling culture and cultural re-enactment. 8. History games. Part 4: History on Television. 9. Contemporary historical documentary. 10. Reality, professional reality, celebrity and object history. 11. History on television around the world. Part 5: The ‘historical’ as cultural genre. 12. Historical television: Adaptation, original drama, comedy and time-travel. 13. Historical Film 14. Imagined histories: Novels, plays and comics. Part 6: Material Histories. 15. The everyday historical: local history, antiques, metal detecting. 16. Museums, tourism, gift shops and the historical experience. Conclusions. Index.