Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries—Cultural Meanings, Social Practices

Popular presentations of history have recently been discovered as a new field of research, and even though interest in it has been growing noticeably very little has been published on this topic. This volume is one of the first to open up this new area of historical research, introducing some of the work that has emerged in Germany over the past few years. While mainly focusing on Germany (though not exclusively), the authors analyze different forms of popular historiographies and popular presentations of history since 1800 and the interrelation between popular and academic historiography, exploring in particular popular histories in different media and popular historiography as part of memory culture.

Sylvia Paletschek has been Professor in Modern History at the University of Freiburg (Germany) since 2001 and was Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College at Oxford University in 2006–2007. Her research interests include women’s and gender history, history of universities, memory culture, and history of historiography. Her publications include Women’s Emancipation Movements in the 19th Century: A European Perspective (with Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, Stanford University Press, 2004) and The Gender of Memory. Cultures of Remembrance in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe, (with Sylvia Schraut, Campus/Chicago University Press, 2008).