by Mindy Clegg

For many historians beginning their journey through graduate school, one question arises over others to prompt many sleepness nights: so what? We, as individual scholars, hope to formulate a unique choice of topics. But at times an advisor or the department might push you into a more mainstream and marketable topic, that turns heads but avoids toes. “So what?” has become shorthand for being able to show that your project helps other historians and the public understand historical processes or events in new ways. Historians tend toward a more conservative bent than our more anarchic colleagues over in English and Sociology departments or in Gender studies. It can be a steeper climb for bringing in perspectives or topics that are a bit more off the beaten path. Sometimes, a more modern historical focus or historical narratives that center on mass culture still get short-shrift, unless framed in particular ways—despite the enormous impact mass media and culture have in our world today.
The “so what?” question that historians must engage with provides the key explanation for this state of affairs. Mass and popular culture, I argue, offer a variety of ways to examine and think about history in the modern period. Understanding that impact is critical to understanding some of the key events of modern global history, from the top-down and bottom-up. Mass media and mass/popular culture have not been entirely ignored, but tend to be studied within particular contexts, such as the Cold War, to give them more legitimacy in historical studies. Often these are seen primarily in a top-down manner, for example as a vector for American empire, but there are other ways to see the spread of mass mediated popular culture. I argue here that especially in recent years, popular culture has been a location for rebuilding community in a world of capitalist individualism and for crafting new kinds of identities. How people have engaged with mass produced culture and have sought to create mass culture of their own (and control the means of production in the process) show some interesting cracks in the “society of the spectacle” facade.1 In other words, how people make connection and meaning out of the culture in which they live matters. Read more »