Editor’s Note. At each annual meeting the Professional, Teaching, and Research Divisions, and the AHA Committee on Women Historians, sponsor sessions on issues that are central to a committee’s work and to the interests of many of our members. The 1985 Annual Meeting in New York City saw five sponsored sessions; the reports submitted by the session chairs are reprinted below. The chair of the Research Division’s session also includes the text of one of the session papers (on scholarly publishing) as an especially clear and urgent statement by the director of a major university press. Questions, comments, or requests for further information should be directed to session participants, or sent “in care of” to the AHA’s national office (400 A Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003).
Sponsored by the AHA Teaching Division
The Historian and the Moving-Image Media
CHAIR: John E. O’Connor, New Jersey Institute of Technology
PANELISTS: Gerald Herman, Northeastern University
Thomas Cripps, Morgan State University
Garth Jowett, University of Houston
Daniel J. Leab, Seton Hall University
COMMENT: The Audience
Far more people will learn (or think they learn) lessons in Russian History from the docudrama mini-series Peter The Great (aired on NBC TV in February) than will register in all college history classes in 1986. Regardless of the historical subfield, many more audiovisual materials will be used in classrooms this year than ever before.
Whether viewers experience such programs in living rooms or school rooms, however, few will be equipped to fully comprehend them or learn from them in really critical ways. The National Endowment for the Humanities has funded an AHA Teaching Division project that seeks to address this issue by synthesizing several critical approaches to visual perception in history and encouraging historians to incorporate a concern for “visual literacy” into their teaching and research, Session #50 at the AHA Annual Meeting in New York constituted a progress report on this project.
The first phase of the project was concentrated on refining those methodological approaches to visual materials that are particularly oriented to the types of investigation most common for historians. As session chair and project director, I explained how, at the proposal stage, project participants had identified the four “frameworks” for historical inquiry that seems to characterize the general types of historical questions which scholars most often seek to answer through the study of visual evidence. Each of these frameworks has been studied by three scholars (twelve in all) over the past year toward the completion of a book (expected Spring 1987). They came together at a special conference at the Library of Congress in May 1985 to discuss their ideas with thirty other experts in the field. The presenters at the December session used video clips to illustrate their summary explanations of the project’s work with regard to each of the four “frameworks.”
Gerald Herman of Northeastern University discussed Framework I, “The Study of Documentary, Newsreel, and Television News as Factual Resource.” Although at first glance it might seem that a film record of a historical event might be the best form of evidence about it, he explained the various ways in which it was wanting. Understanding why film footage and videotape constitute such unreliable sources (understanding the ways in which it is open to manipulation, for example) is the first step toward “visual literacy.” Herman went on, however, to summarize his own and other project participants’ work on other ways in which moving image evidence can be a crucial source of historical fact. For example, although German newsreel reports on World War II battles are so riddled with propaganda as to be totally useless for studying the battles themselves, they do represent particularly pertinent evidence for the study of what Nazi leaders wanted the public to know at the time.
Similarly, television news and television commercials are essential references for any scholar working on recent American political history—not on the realities of the political situation but on the perception of issues and personalities projected to the public. Herman also described his work with graduate students in history, editing and reediting newsreel footage to learn about the many ways in which such materials are open to interpretation.
Thomas Cripps of Morgan State University addressed Framework II, “The Study of Moving-Image Documents as Social and Cultural History.” Scholars in history and communication studies have been referring to film and television as barometers of social and cultural values for several decades. More often than not, however, such references are casual, impressionistic, and unrelated to any serious analysis. Cripps noted the work of other project participants who are relating the evolution of methodologies in the study of cinema to more general trends in the theory and practice of social and cultural history.
Cripps focused on his own work on a 1943 Warner Brothers’ film, It Happened in Springfield, to illustrate why historians must recognize the need for more rigorous research into the production history of films that they cite as evidence for broad social or cultural values. What establishes this film as a prime source of evidence on wartime racial attitudes is entirely in the production files. A complex combination of racial prejudice, business sense, and the studio’s perception of national purpose explain why the film never reached the screen in the form in which it was originally intended. Scholars and teachers should be encouraged to seek insights into social and cultural concerns in popular film, but they must recognize that the film is as complex a source as any other historical document or artifact, and that it deserves the same careful analysis.
Garth Jowett of the University of Houston concentrated on Framework III,”The Study of Moving-Image Documents for the History of Media Industries and Art Forms.” He stressed the fact that, while more historians do seem to be expressing an interest in studying film and television, the importance of mass media as an influence in history has yet to be realized by the larger population of scholars. His informal survey of American history textbooks found none that did real justice to the subject. The work of other project participants in Framework III has centered on surveying the writing and interpretation of film history from business and aesthetic points of view, and establishing the importance of historians working with film having some sense of film theory.
Daniel Leab of Seton Hall University discussed Framework IV, “The Study of Film and Television as Interpreter of History.” In summarizing his own work and that of fellow project participants, Leab indicated how feature films that deal with historical subjects, TV docudramas, and even historian-produced compilation documentary films present problems in historical analysis. Many of these problems are related to institutional pressures in the various media and to understanding the intentions of the filmmakers. But others center on the need to train viewers to be more critical in evaluating what they see and recognizing that every visual representation, even the ones based purely on archival footage, represent historical in terpretations.
The second phase of the project will see the publication of the project volume and, cross referenced to it, a new edition of the AHA pamphlet Teaching Hist01y with Film. The third and final phase, already under way, involves the presentation of demonstration inservice workshops for teachers. Six such presentations (to two high school districts, two two-year colleges and two four-year colleges) will lay the foundation for a continuing AHA inservice program.
John E. O'Connor
New Jersey Institute of Technology
