Television is a visual medium. History is largely given to us via a textual medium. Television encourages people to think in bite-size moments, not to cultivate the sustained patience it takes to work through a text.
Consequently, the History Channel concentrates on the most dramatic piece of history we have that is available to us via visual media: World War II. Second runners up include things like the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, and sundry other smaller episodes of humans murdering each other, with the Beatles and some jiggle thrown in for cultchah.
Basically, it’s history for Generation Narcissus, who are certain that aside from war stories told them by their dads, much of the rest of history is bunk anyway since all the really important things were discovered by our precious generation.
So true, and so sad. Not that history cannot be told via other mediums, like television. A well done documentary can sometimes capture the essence, give enough information to whet the appetite, and use visuals to explain and enhance. Was a time when the HC, like A&E, Discovery, and The Learning Channel all had potential. Sigh.
I think even some well-made history movies could be better than much of what they do. There are many stories, even of WWII, that aren’t in films or not in films commonly seen. Like the purge of Jehovah’s Witnesses by the Nazis. I’m not sympathetic to their religion understand, but they really did suffer for their faith. More relevant to here maybe something on “Action T-4″, the Nazi program that killed disabled, or the resistance to Nazism done by the Catholic Church in the Netherlands.
Outside WWII they could do a documentary or biopic on Kim Il-Sung, the guy that started the whole crazy Kim dynasty of North Korea. Or just show things like “The Lion in Winter.” May not be historically all that accurate, but Eleanor of Aquitaine was a pretty fascinating person so more interest on the period could be neat.
History is fascinating, endlessly fascinating. Too bad that there’s so little real history on the History Channel (although I will admit I love Pawn Stars, American Pickers and American Restoration).
Extraterrestrials visiting the ancient world apparently had nothing better to do than build mathematically precise rock piles for the Druids and Egyptians.
What are you saying here, Mark? That Extraterrestrials did not visit the ancient world to build mathematically precise rock piles for the Druids and Egyptians?
As a member of the pro-Extraterrestrial community, I deeply resent your Extraterrestrialphobia.
Completely off topic: Today’s wildly inappropriate ad is for “Divorce for Men”. What a great tie-in with the lingerie ads and the Roman orgy ads. Perhaps you cannot control the completely inappropriate ad content that appears on the right side of your blog, Mark, but a) it doesn’t appear that you’re trying very hard; and b) this trash is pretty unavoidable when we try to read your blog. Since your switch to Pantheos it has been a non-stop assault. I can’t control what you post but I can certainly control what I choose to look at. There are simply too many other exceptional Catholic blogs out there that don’t have this kind of garbage on them for me to waste any more time here. I’m banning myself. Bye.
Speaking of non-stop assault, right now there is an ad offering help on how to get organized. As someone who has dealt with clutter all my life, and already feels plenty bad about it, it stings to be reminded by your blog that I have some power over my life.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never noticed any objectionable ads here. I’m rarely conscious of the ads at all, but as I go out of my way to look at them now I see one for Mitt Romney and one for what appears to be some sort of Christian novel. I’ve no interest in either of those things, but they neither constitute a near occasion of sin for me nor threaten to turn this blog into a moral cesspool.
May I recommend Adblock Plus? http://adblockplus.org/en/ I’m always shocked at how many really awful ads are on the internet when I have to use a computer without it.
I just scrolled down and saw ads for something called Liberty University, for “Simplifying the Soul” by Paula Huston, for Ancestry.com, for Amazon and Netflix, and for a number of Catholic sites. I suspect the crawlers keep track of web-sites most visited by the viewer and pluck ads supposedly customized to that viewer.
It’s only going to get worse as Google ties together every entity they own to track our every Google search and website visit (see recent news reports).
Go to Google.com/dashboard
to see the kinds of things they are tracking on you. Between Google and Facebook (which I refuse to use) we ought to be far more afraid of what they are doing to destroy our privacy than anything the gov has done. The horrible thing about facebook is that they are tieing info about you with everyone in your friends list, and everyone in your friends, friend list, and on and on.
P.S. On principle I make it a point not to buy any product or patronize any vendor that uses my Google data to target their ads to me. It really pisses me off that my emails are sniffed for words that throw up highly specific ads.
Sorry for the hijacking of the thread.
I’m actually glad I get customized ads. That way I don’t have to see things about women’s lingerie (like in the newspaper) and instead get ads for things I’m actually interested in…
I want to point out that history can be told, and told well, on Television, even those parts of history that happened before the invention of TV or the motion picture. Indeed, while the history channel did once tend to focus on WWII and the American Civil War (because they are exciting), they have done other excellent documentaries (and of course other channels like PBS have done some excellent history documentaries as ell).
To be a good history program in TV though, you need a good storyteller. Ken Burns did this with his documentaries on the Civil War and Baseball (well the latter was too long, but then again, so are many baseball games
). Simon Schama did it with his “A History or Britain”.
History is a very important and worthwhile subject. The complaints I read here about the “History Channel” over look the fact that not too long ago there was no History Channel. All documentaries or historical presentations will naturally tend to have some bias toward the views/opinions harbored by their creator/producer. Even encyclopedic reports are written largely from the “the victor writes the history standpoint” esp. when you realize that the opposing viewpoints do not even ever get mentioned. When have you ever heard of say “The complaints of the peoples decimated by the ravaging Mongol Hordes” for instance. I do agree that a great deal of shows make it onto the History Channel that do not seem to have much to do with history, but I for one am glad that this channel exists and hope that it continues. The thing to remember is that The History Channel will air the shows that receive the most viewer comment and support. Feedback is important.
Even encyclopedic reports are written largely from the “the victor writes the history standpoint” esp. when you realize that the opposing viewpoints do not even ever get mentioned.
This explains why we know nothing about the Southern views of the Civil War, and information about Hitler has been erased from the record, and all knowledge of the French Monarchy has been deleted from existence since the French Revolution, and it is impossible to find out anything about the losers of World War I.
Oh. Wait. Actually, it’s pretty easy to find all this information and “Winners write the history” theology (for it is, after all, a faith proposition) is rubbish. In the case of the Crusades, it is largely the losers (that is, Europeans) who wrote the histories.
Agreed. At best this was only true when the “losers” were a continuously non-literate and/or utterly annihilated people. So what we know of the Arawak of the Caribbean could be said to be by “the victors”, or at most by Arawak-sympathizing descendants of “the victors”, rather than the “losers.”
But so often, maybe most of the time, that’s not what happened so it doesn’t work. You can get history by Tibetans, Kurds, Basques, the Cherokee, and several other “conquered peoples.”
“In the case of the Crusades, it is largely the losers (that is, Europeans) who wrote the histories”.
That is, if you cannot read Arabic. What you mean I suppose is that you read only the European versions.
Belloc observed that literacy is undermined by too great a use of pictures. Gore Vidal noted rightly that many people think that Abraham Lincoln looked like Henry Fonda.
Actually, it could easily be argued that a pro-Confederate view of the war has dominated the teaching of Civil War history for many decades. The “Lost Cause” school very deeply colors the popular view of the war. Just go into any public library and count the number of books they have on Robert E. Lee (the loser). Then, count the number of books they have on Ulysses Grant (the winner). The work of people like Gary Gallagher, James McPherson, Stephen Sears, and Noah Trudeau is changing this view, and it’s about time.
History Channel used to carry some very worthwhile programming, but has really gone downhill in the past few years. Now National Geographic Channel and even Spike Channel’s Deadliest Warrior series have more interesting history than anything on History Channel.
Any time the History Channel has a show on about the Middle Ages, the Church, or Rome, I know I might as well read comic books. Even my 4-year Bachelor’s Degree knows enough to be disgusted by the pseudo-history on that channel.
Could not agree more.
It is a shame, I used to see SOME good stuff on their years ago, but even then it was filled with errors.
dang!
It’s supposed to read “there” not “their”
now I feel silly
I followed the advice of many of the people whom I respect and have dropped Cable TV. I seriously doubt I’ll ever go back. Why would I when I can use Netflix to watch only what I want to watch commercial free (for the time being) and can get anything else I want from our local stations or from the internet (EWTN)?
Me too. We have straight internet now and rarely watch any TV except some local news/weather and PBS occasionally. When our DVR died we didn’t even replace it because there is nothing much worth recording.
a) WW2 in HD was produced by a local guy, Lou Reda, that my dad knows from a restaurant he frequents. He recently moved his studio into the old St. Michael’s Church that the diocese sold when it combined three parishes into my own current parish.
b) Our generation discovered many things. For example, we discovered sex, which had been unknown to all previous generations.
I was without cable TV for a couple of years and when I got it back I found that Animal Planet had quit being about animals. It’s a little better now, but for a while there all I could find were shows about ghosts, survival stories, bigfoot, monsters… What the heck?
Also… I once saw a show on the Biography Channel on Benedict Arnold. It was fascinating. But, you can’t find stuff like that anymore. Benedict Arnold hasn’t been in any movies lately and he isn’t what you’d call a celebrity.
I’m currently reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), which argues that television is above all else an entertainment medium, and thus, anything on it is required to be entertaining. On news programs, stories are presented in short segments that do not provide context or explain why they might be relevant to viewers. Consequently, viewers tend not to remember these segments well. Postman argues that this has had a highly detrimental effect on political discourse in the USA.
It’s an interesting book, and this post seems like an example of what Postman was saying.
“Basically, it’s history for Generation Narcissus, who are certain that aside from war stories told them by their dads, much of the rest of history is bunk anyway since all the really important things were discovered by our precious generation.”
Ding! Ding! Ding! Winner!
HC quit being about history and about Progressive theology long ago and I’m glad I quit watching it.
Letters from a few Confederate soldiers to their homesteads are not what I call a Southern point of view in these shows…
I have not watched TV for many, many years, for many reasons (not necessarily in order of importance):
1) Canadian regulations allow a maximum of 12 minutes per half hour of commercials, this means that for every hour watching TV, I would see up to 24 minutes of advertisement, often repeated hundreds of times over the weeks. At my age, I have no time for watching advertisements… Plus, I have a very good visual memory and seeing the same thing over and over again really gets on my nerves.
2) In order to appeal to as large an audience as possible, any TV program has to be easily understood by people with average intelligence and education levels. Hence it is practically impossible to learn anything in depth from TV, all that is showed is at best a very basic introduction to a subject. If I am interested in a subject, after over 60 years of being an avid reader, I already know more than what is being shown. If I am not interested, I don’t necessarily want to spend my time getting basic information that I don’t need and don’t want. Again, a matter of choosing how to use my time.
3) Of course, when TV arrived in my family’s home, I was already 15 years old and addicted to reading.
4) I resent the fact that after paying good money to purchase a set, I would have to pay a monthly fee to watch anything, including those 24 minutes of advertisement per hour. And my cash flow as a self-employed person rarely allowed for it anyway.
5) I can get news, entertainment and good reading (including Mark’s blog) on my computer.
Etc…
I don’t know, Mark.
You will be very hard pressed to find any Anglo with any knowledge whatever of, to use a personal example, the originator of the Tsalagi syllabary that wasn’t manufactured by Anglos.
I will grant that the one attempt to provide the truth about Sowgili’s life, by my cousin Traveller Bird, went way too far in the other direction. I still don’t grasp what possessed him.
I’ve seen the victors get away with so much unchallenged. I just can’t entirely agree.
Ah, the history of the american… a gator hunter.. twang! people who sell rusted garbage “for profit”! Oh, just think of what we can do politically when we tell the “truth” about americans. Better yet, lets “show” that history is really about the best eating that was “the forgotten asian heritage”, of the hot plate of stinky tofu cooked on the drippings of squid sewage. Lets put forth that “history” “shows” that rock worshipers created art and music. (Marthe) is correct, but like so many of us… alone…We read real books by people that had to “show” that what they wrote, is true. It cuts one to the heart to hear the younger generation state, “hey, it was shown on the history channel”.
Perhaps its a test.
+J.M.J+
Anyone here watch any episodes of “How The States Got Their Shapes” on HC? I find it fascinating, one of the better shows on the channel IMHO.
But yeah, there’s too much garbage on HC that has little or nothing to do with history. I’ve long felt that even the historical documentaries on HC, A&E and similar channels are too sensationalist, with snippets of shocking “dramatic recreations” played over and over again during the program for effect. The first such cable documentary I remember watching years ago was about witch trials. It showed (re-enacted) footage of some men running after and seizing a woman accused of being a witch. They then tore open the back of her dress, exposing some kind of birthmark on her back which allegedly “marked” her as a witch. I thought that was lurid and unnecessary, very different from the traditional, non-sensational documentaries I was used to watching at the time.
Since then, I’ve seen similar kinds of footage, usually involving either sex or gore, in other cable documentaries. It always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If I’m really interested in the topic, then I don’t need such garbage to make me watch the show.
Good history programs are somewhat expensive and time-consuming to produce. The producers have to hire competent people, travel to international settings or use actors and costumes for re-enactments.
I take history programming for what it is: an introduction. The problem is that many people don’t understand it’s an introduction and treat the show as the final word.
Sorry, I forgot my comment on your headline. Judging by the number of replies, it does not make us “dumb”, i.e., speechless. I suppose you mean it makes us stupid.
An interesting study could be made of the delicate avoidance of the word “stupid”. Is this part of the Non-U phenomenon?