What happens when history is interpreted and disseminated by movies, TV and comic books?
Tessa Morris-Suzuki is a Professor in the Research School of Pacific and Asian History at the Australian National University. She is the author of numerous books including Showa: An Inside History of Hirohito's Japan, Beyond Computopia and Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation.
To understand how knowledge of the past is communicated in an age of mass media, it becomes necessary to understand something of the way in which conventions have been formed, and the way in which they shape the stories that can be told about the past. Each medium has its own history, its own conventions, its own store of memories. Our understandings of events like the rise of Hitler or the outbreak of the Korean War depend not just on who is telling the story but also on whether we encounter the story in a history textbook, as a historical novel, a collection of photographs, a TV documentary or a feature film.
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