television

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• 12/11/2022
  

  How Should Popular Culture Convey History?

  by Walter G. Moss

  A recent plot point in Netflix's "The Crown" was based on a falsification of historical events. Historians who want to influence public knowledge of history need to be able to match the narrative appeal of television with a commitment to telling the truth. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  11/2/2022
  

  "A League of Their Own" Update Engages Lives of Queer Women in the 1940s

  by Lauren Gutterman

  "The series’ portrait of queer life amid World War II might seem unrealistic to some, but history reveals that queer women and trans men — from butch to femme and married to unmarried — often found opportunities to act on their desires and build queer communities."

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• SOURCE: TIME
  9/17/2022
  

  Does Ken Burns's Holocaust Doc Face Thorny Questions about U.S. Actions?

  by Olivia B. Waxman

  Historians involved with the PBS project wrestle with the question of whether the United States could reasonably have done more to offer asylum to Europe's Jews or to stop their mass-scale murder. 

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  9/7/2022
  

  "Rings of Power" Speaks to a War-Hungry Audience

  by Daniel Bessner

  Inspired by Tolkien's experiences in the Great War, his fantasy books have been taken as allegories for the fight against Nazism, the Cold War, and the War on Terror. The new series reflects the anxieties of an American empire with neither a clear enemy nor the imagination to abandon militarism. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/7/2022
  

  Stories of Women's Comeuppance Expose Cruelty at Heart of Modern Society

  by Sarah Horowitz

  Like Anna Delvey and Elizabeth Holmes today, the 1909 trial of Marguerite Steinheil in Paris focused on an ambitious woman as a villain, but revealed a wider climate of impunity and self-dealing among elite men. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/4/2022
  

  The Real Medieval Civil War that Inspires "House of the Dragon"

  by Gillian Brockell

  The Anarchy, an English war of succession that lasted from 1138 to 1153, is part of the narrative inspiration for the new fantasy series. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  8/1/2022
  

  At 100, Norman Lear's Transformative Influence is Still Felt on TV

  by Oscar Winberg

  "All in the Family" capitalized on the culture wars of the 1960s to show that television networks could depart from safe, inoffensive programming and acknowledge social divisions. 

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• SOURCE: Hartford Courant
  6/3/2022
  

  Professor Discusses the use of Asylum Scenes in "Stranger Things"

  Troy Rondinone's expertise on cultural portrayals of mental health facilities connects with two key plotlines in the latest season of the Netflix horror series. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  5/19/2022
  

  Ukraine's Eurovision Victory Not the First Time Politics Has Been on Stage

  by Tess Megginson

  Since its beginnings in 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest has been a stage for statements about the politics of the continent, from the Cold War to the growth of the EU to the invasion of Ukraine. 

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• SOURCE: Newsweek
  5/1/2022
  

  "Gaslit" Recalls Martha Mitchell's Role in the Watergate Scandal

  The outspoken and media-friendly wife of Attorney General John Mitchell had warned reporters of CREEP "dirty tricks" before the infamous burglary. After, keeping her from talking to reporters was the first battle of the coverup.

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• SOURCE: CNN
  4/29/2022
  

  "Pachinko" Tells History of Korean Women in Mid-20th Century Japan

  The Apple+ series, based in a fictionalized narrative of Korean immigration to Japan, concludes with interview footage of eight women, now all more than 90 years old, who lived this history. 

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• SOURCE: Religion Dispatches
  4/25/2022
  

  "Under the Banner" Improves, but Doesn't Sanitize, Book's Reductive History of Mormonism

  by Benjamin E. Park

  The new series raises questions about America's homegrown faith, and shakes off some of the source book's post-9/11 concerns with extremism and religious violence to show the complexity among different tendencies and branches of the faith. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  4/19/2022
  

  New TV Shows Reduce "Black Excellence" to Materialism

  by Tanisha C. Ford

  Equating excellence with opulence, and portraying the Black wealthy as champions of progress, ignores many of the ongoing concerns of Black Americans and highlights historically significant class divisions among African Americans. 

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  4/7/2022
  

  "Is It Cake?" is Brain Candy for Pandemic-Weary, but also Part of Long History of Visual Illusion

  by Maggie Cao

  "At a time when we often don’t know if what we encounter on our screens can be trusted, it feels good to alleviate those anxieties with a show in which the only consequence of being fooled is cutting into a shoe that we assumed was a cake."

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• SOURCE: Slate
  3/24/2022
  

  "Bridgerton" Keeps Perpetuating the Hollywood Corset Myth

  by Hilary Davidson

  Hollywood tends to portray women's historical fashions through a lens formed by today's ways of dressing, and ignore the more complex material and social history of clothing. 

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• SOURCE: Fast Company
  2/12/2022
  

  Docuseries "Everything's Gonna Be All White" Challenges Recurrent Historical Denial

  The CRT moral panic is just the latest instance of white America preferring to forget about the significance of race in history. Historian Nell Irvin Painter joins a new series where Americans of color critique the idea of whiteness. 

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• SOURCE: Forward
  1/31/2022
  

  Whoopi Goldberg's Holocaust History Latest "The View" Flap

  The host's comments that the Nazi persecution of Jews was not rooted in racism drew argument from fellow panelists and is at odds with historians' understanding of European antisemitism. 

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• SOURCE: The Guardian
  1/23/2022
  

  Reviewed: The BBC: A People's History

  David Hendy's book was built on complete access to BBC archives, but a reviewer finds that it's long on bureaucratic history and short on analysis of the programming that made the Beeb a national institution. 

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• 1/30/2022
  

  Neville Chamberlain: Unsung Hero of WWII

  by Luke Reader

  A new Netflix film should prompt a reassessment of the legacy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who arguably succeeded in saving Britain and the European opposition to Hitler through a two-pronged strategy that used appeasement to buy time for rearmament. 

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• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  1/18/2022
  

  Native on TV in 2021

  by Liza Black

  "Where 20th- and early 21st-century shows used Native characters in superficial ways, perhaps to create an appearance of diversity, Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls center Indigenous characters, themes, and content, decolonizing conventional television narratives about Native people."