Switching Gears

The initial set of posts on this blog have looked at  history through the lens of television storytelling. As I switch gears to write about the next portion of the syllabus, I want to spend a little time talking about historical imagination and historical storytelling, outside of the context of a particular medium.

Several months ago, I came across a book called Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, by Sam Wineburg. Wineburg was a high school history teacher and later got a PhD in cognitive psychology. He has researched how students learn history and people think about, talk about, tell stories about history -- both the history they have experienced in their own lives, and long ago history that have only experienced through books, and in many cases, pop culture.

For Wineburg, historical thinking is a "way of knowing" that involves a particular kind of imagination. By default, he argues, people think about history in terms of the present -- they assume that things that are common sense, practical, natural, etc. for them were also sensible for historical actors. Wineburg labels this default state of mind "presentism" and argues that historical education should aim to challenge presentism by challenging people to consider the ways in which people who lived in the past thought differently -- had different assumptions, a different notion of what was right and wrong. Wineburg sees historical thinking as a "tension between the familiar and the strange, between feelings of proximity and feelings of distance in people we seek to understand."

I want to jump off of Wineburg's word "tension", because as we have been discussing, serialized narrative requires a certain ongoing tension. I would argue that for the viewer of Mad Men, there is a tension between the familiar and the strange as we imaginatively put ourselves in the shoes of different characters and think about the decisions they make. The tension may be most acute with Betty Draper, as we see her struggle with social norms and constraints that are different from our own.

I think its important to keep Wineburg in mind as we think about historical accuracy in Mad Men. Certainly historical accuracy is more than setting; more than references to elections and other big events; more than attention to detail in clothing and set design and period props. Its psychological and sociological accuracy is an opportunity for the audience to engage their historical imagination, as Wineburg conceives it, as part of the imaginative work of following a serialized narrative.