Popular Histories
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Popular Histories
Popular history is a broad genre of historiography that takes a popular approach, aims at a wide readership, and usually emphasizes narrative, personality and vivid detail over scholarly analysis. The term is used in contradistinction to professional academic or scholarly history writing which is usually more specialized and technical and, thus, less accessible to the general reader. Conceptualizations It is proposed that popular history is a "moral science" in the sense that recreates the past not only for its own sake but also to underscore how history could facilitate an ethically responsible present. Some view it as history produced by authors who are better interlocutors capable of translating the language of scientificity to ordinary everyday language. Some scholars partly attributed the development of popular history to the increase of writers-turned-historians such as Benson Lossing, David Pae, and Mary Botham Howitt, who wrote historical events "in good style" and, th ...
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Genre
Genre () is any form or type of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other forms of art or entertainment, whether written or spoken, audio or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria, yet genres can be aesthetic, rhetorical, communicative, or functional. Genres form by conventions that change over time as cultures invent new genres and discontinue the use of old ones. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. Stand-alone texts, works, or pieces of communication may have individual styles, but genres are amalgams of these texts based on agreed-upon or socially inferred conventions. Some genres may have rigid, strictly adhered-to guidelines, while others may show great flexibility. Genre began as an absolute classification system for ancient Greek literature, a ...
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Tom Holland (author)
Thomas Holland (born 5 January 1968) is an English author who has published best-selling books on topics including classical and medieval history and the origins of Islam. He has worked with the BBC to create and host historical television documentaries, and presents the radio series ''Making History''. Early life and education Holland was born in Oxfordshire and brought up in the village of Broad Chalke near Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, the elder of two sons. His younger brother James Holland is also an author whose focus is World War II. He has said that his two passions as a child were dinosaurs and ancient civilizations: "I had the classic small boy's fascination with dinosaurs – because they're glamorous, dangerous and extinct – and essentially the appeal of the empires of antiquity is much the same. There's a splendour and a terror about them that appealed to me – and that kind of emotional attachment is something that stays with you." Holland attended Chafy ...
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Max Cutler
Max Cutler (born December 31, 1990) is an American entrepreneur, creator, investor, producer and businessman best known for founding the podcast StudiParcastin 2016. With Cutler at the helm, Parcast has launched some of the most popular and highly-ranked weekly, podcasts, specializing in popular genres like mystery, true crime, pop culture, wellness and history. After three years of exponential growth, Spotify acquired Parcast in 2019. Cutler maintains his role as head of the studio, revolutionizing the podcast space and delivering hit after hit. Most recently featured on Fortune 40 Under 40, Forbes 30 Under 30 and The Hollywood Reporter's 35 Rising Executives Under 35 lists, Cutler shows no sign of slowing down, taking on additional responsibility as Spotify’s Head of New Content Initiatives. Parcast continues to lead the Podcast industry in global growth with over 140 adaptations, in eight different languages, and will continue its expansion into new markets in the future. E ...
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David McCullough
David Gaub McCullough (; July 7, 1933 – August 7, 2022) was an American popular historian. He was a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In 2006, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, McCullough earned a degree in English literature from Yale University. His first book was '' The Johnstown Flood'' (1968), and he wrote nine more on such topics as Harry S. Truman, John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal, and the Wright brothers. McCullough also narrated numerous documentaries, such as '' The Civil War'' by Ken Burns, as well as the 2003 film ''Seabiscuit'', and he hosted ''American Experience'' for twelve years. McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize–winning books, '' Truman'' and ''John Adams'', were adapted by HBO into a TV film and a miniseries, respectively. Life and career Youth and education McCullough was born in the Point Bree ...
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Shelby Foote
Shelby Dade Foote Jr. (November 17, 1916 – June 27, 2005) was an American writer, historian and journalist. Although he primarily viewed himself as a novelist, he is now best known for his authorship of '' The Civil War: A Narrative'', a three-volume history of the American Civil War. With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta, Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the Old South to the Civil Rights era of the New South. Foote was little known to the general public until his appearance in Ken Burns's PBS documentary '' The Civil War'' in 1990, where he introduced a generation of Americans to a war that he believed was "central to all our lives." Foote did all his writing by hand with a nib pen, later transcribing the result into a typewritten copy. While Foote's work was mostly well-received during his lifetime, it has been criticized by academics in the 21st century. Early life Foote was born in Greenville, ...
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Dan Carlin
Dan Carlin (born November 14, 1965) is an American podcaster and political commentator. Previously a professional radio host, Carlin hosts three popular independent podcasts: ''Hardcore History'', ''Hardcore History: Addendum'', and ''Common Sense'', for which he received recognitions and awards, including best educational and history podcasts, and ranking among the best podcasts of all time. His first book was published in 2019, and he has been involved in a range of other media appearances and collaborations. Background Carlin obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Colorado Boulder. He broke into the television news business in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and covered the 1992 Los Angeles riots. He has worked as a television news reporter, an author, a columnist, and a radio talk show host. No longer broadcasting on terrestrial radio, Carlin has achieved recognition in internet radio, podcasting, and the blogosphere. Carlin is the son of Academy ...
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Bruce Catton
Charles Bruce Catton (October 9, 1899 – August 28, 1978) was an American historian and journalist, known best for his books concerning the American Civil War. Known as a narrative historian, Catton specialized in popular history, featuring interesting characters and historical vignettes, in addition to the basic facts, dates, and analyses. His books were researched well and included footnotes. He won a Pulitzer Prize during 1954 for '' A Stillness at Appomattox'', his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia. Early life Charles Bruce Catton was born in Petoskey, Michigan, to George R. and Adela M. (Patten) Catton, and raised in Benzonia, Michigan. His father was a Congregationalist minister, who accepted a teaching position in Benzonia Academy and later became the academy's headmaster. As a boy, Catton first heard the reminiscences of the aged veterans who had fought in the Civil War. In his memoir, ''Waiting for the Morning Train'' (1972), Catton explained how t ...
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Walter Lord
John Walter Lord Jr. (October 8, 1917 – May 19, 2002) was an American author, lawyer, copywriter and popular historian best known for his 1955 account of the sinking of the RMS ''Titanic'', '' A Night to Remember''. Biography Early life Lord was born in Baltimore, Maryland to John Walter Lord Sr. and Henrietta MacTier (Hoffman) Lord on October 8, 1917. His father, who was a lawyer, died when Lord was just three years old. Lord's grandfather, Richard Curzon Hoffman, was president of the Baltimore Steam Packet Company ("Old Bay Line") steamship firm in the 1890s. In July 1925, at the age of 7, Lord traveled across the Atlantic Ocean with his mother and sister, from New York to Cherbourg and Southampton, on the RMS ''Olympic'', the ''Titanic''s sister ship. Like many other boys who attended high school at Baltimore's Gilman School, he spent his summers at Hyde Bay Camp for Boys at Hyde Bay in Cooperstown, New York, where he was awarded the honorary title of "The Commodore" ...
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Stella Tillyard
Stella Tillyard FRSL (born 1957) is an English author and historian, educated at Oxford and Harvard Universities and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1999 her bestselling book ''Aristocrats'' was made into a six-part series for BBC1/Masterpiece Theatre sold to over 20 countries. Winner of the Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Longman/History Today Prize and the Fawcett Prize, she has taught at Harvard; the University of California, Los Angeles; Birkbeck, London and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, London. She is a visiting professor in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Books *2019 George IV: King in Waiting' *2018 ', Vintage, London, published in 2019 as Call Upon the Water', Simon & Schuster, New York *201 Vintage, London. Danish translation available *2006 A Royal Affair. George III and his Troublesome Siblings', Vintage Books, London. Publis ...
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Hugh Trevor-Roper
Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (15 January 1914 – 26 January 2003) was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of historical topics, but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany. In the view of John Kenyon, "some of revor-Roper'sshort essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men's books". This is echoed by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman in the introduction to ''One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper'' (2014): "The bulk of his publications is formidable... Some of his essays are of Victorian length. All of them reduce large subjects to their essence. Many of them... have lastingly transformed their fields." On the other hand, his biographer Adam Sisman also writes that "the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject which he has made his own. By this exact ...
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Christopher Hill (historian)
John Edward Christopher Hill (6 February 1912 – 23 February 2003) was an English Marxist historian and academic, specialising in 17th-century English history. From 1965 to 1978 he was Master of Balliol College, Oxford. Early life Christopher Hill was born on 6 February 1912, Bishopthorpe Road, York, to Edward Harold Hill and Janet Augusta ('' née'' Dickinson). His father was a solicitor and the family were devout Methodists. He attended St Peter's School, York. At the age of 16, he sat his entrance examination at Balliol College, Oxford. The two history tutors who marked his papers recognised his ability and offered him a place in order to forestall any chance he might go to the University of Cambridge. In 1931 Hill took a prolonged holiday in Freiburg, Germany, where he witnessed the rise of the Nazi Party, later saying that it contributed significantly to the radicalisation of his politics. He matriculated at Balliol College in 1931. In the following year he won th ...
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Paul Johnson (writer)
Paul Bede Johnson (born 2 November 1928) is an English journalist, popular historian, speechwriter, and author. Although associated with the political left in his early career, he is now a conservative popular historian. Johnson was educated at the Jesuit independent school Stonyhurst College, and at Magdalen College, Oxford. He first came to prominence in the 1950s as a journalist writing for and later editing the ''New Statesman'' magazine. A prolific writer, Johnson has written over 40 books and contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers. His sons include the journalist Daniel Johnson, founder of '' Standpoint'' magazine, and the businessman Luke Johnson, former chairman of Channel 4. Early life and career Johnson was born in Manchester. His father, William Aloysius Johnson, was an artist and Principal of the Art School in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. At Stonyhurst College, Johnson received an education grounded in the Jesuit method, which he preferre ...
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