Book Review: Popular Media and the American Revolution: Shaping Collective Memory, by Janice Hume

Abstract

Popular Media and the American Revolution: Shaping Collective Memory. Janice Hume. New York: Routledge, 2014. 148 pp. $150 hbk. $38.95 pbk.You could spark a pretty good debate by questioning whether we learn more history from historians and history courses or from popular culture. Whatever the answer, here comes Janice Hume to show convincingly that history, culture, and media have a powerful symbiotic relationship.Hume heads the Department of Journalism at the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. In this monograph-length work, she offers a case study of how our understanding of the American Revolution coalesced over time. Shaped and reshaped by politicians, historians and especially journalists, an epic storyline eventually emerged. It was part fact and part myth, part fortuitous and part strategically reimagined to suit changing times.Not surprisingly, according to Hume, the news media found themselves in the middle of it all.She examines mainstream newspapers, magazines, the alternative press, and to a lesser extent broadcast media, focusing, for example, on the nurturing of the George Washington legend or the didactic and flag-waving nationalism loaded onto Fourth of July celebrations. Through stories, memories, and shared sentiment, she writes, there developed a national of the Revolution, nourished and sustained by popular media and culture, determining to a large extent what Americans both remember and forget.As Hume notes, the news media of the day-mostly newspapers and pamphlets- stirred the colonists toward rebellion and provided information as the war unfolded, though much of it was rumor and hearsay. But her main interest is in what happened afterward, as time passed and the revolutionary narrative played directly into later nation-building goals.Hume effectively shows that it did not take long for Americans to become nostalgic about the Revolution. In newspaper obituaries of veterans of the war, according to one study she cites, service to country during the war . . . was mentioned more frequently even than religious affiliation.While it has become common to speak of journalism as the first rough draft of history, Hume demonstrates that its influence goes much further. From the Revolution forward, even historians often used press accounts as sources, especially those with colorful language, quotations, and narrative. In addition, of course, much history has been written by journalists and former journalists ( think of the current work of Walter Isaacson). So that first rough draft may not be as ephemeral as we sometimes think. …