Gustav Preller (1875–1943), a prolific and popular South African historian, is the man largely responsible for shaping many of the key myths of Afrikaner nationalism. One of these is the concept of the Great Trek, an interpretation of the nineteenth-century movement of Boers into the interior. It is Preller's written and visual version of this social movement that has been the dominant one for the last seven decades. Preller worked with a variety of media including books, newspapers, magazines, drama and film, and always produced works that sold in significant numbers. Yet despite his obvious impact and importance, Preller has been the subject of little research. This article attempts to assess Preller's work in relation to questions concerning the cultural fabrication of nationalisms. It asks how Preller did his popularizing work: what techniques, conventions, narrative formulas and social languages did he deploy in his work and whence did he derive these cultural resources? For Preller, one of the most crucial themes in his work had to do with how people recalled the past and more importantly how one could get them to ‘enact’ this memory in their own lives. Much of his work can be read as a search to find strategies of storing the past in forms which would make popular sense. He relied heavily on oral history and he also familiarized himself with popular forms of both oral and written storytelling which in turn inform his work. In 1916 he became involved in filming De Voortrekkers and these visual skills became a key ingredient in all of his ventures. His interest in the visual also informed his frequent use of the physical objects of the past as vehicles for popularizing his views. Another tactic that Preller followed was to explore and ‘colonize’ the institutions of popular leisure which he then remoulded in his nationalist enterprises. The article concludes with a detailed consideration of one of Preller's historical short stories.