Robert A. Rosenstone
Robert A. Rosenstone, for half a century a professor of history at the California Institute of Technology, has written works of history, biography, criticism, and fiction. His historical writings include Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (1969), Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (1975), and Mirror in the Shrine (1988), while his books on the media include Visions of the Past (1995) and History on Film / Film on History (2006, later editions 2010 and 2018), and two edited collections, Revisioning History (1995) and A Blackwell Companion to Historical Film (2013). Rosenstone has worked as a consultant on several documentaries and feature films, including the Academy Award-winning Reds (1982). He has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Reviews in American History and was a founding editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (4), Fulbright Commission (3 – Japan, Spain, Italy), The East-West Center (Honolulu), and the Getty Research Institute. His most recent work, a memoire entitled Adventures of a Postmodern Historian, was published by Bloomsbury in September 2016.
The Visual Media and History: Where Are We Today
For more than three decades now, scholars from around the world in several disciplines have been dancing around the question initially posed by French scholar, Marc Ferro, in his groundbreaking work, Cinema et histoire: Does a filmic writing of history exist? If no agreed-upon answer has yet been given, the attempts, particularly by those in history and media studies have gone a long way towards explicating both the differences and similarities in traditional history on the page and the more recent audio-visual presentation of history on both the analog and digital screen.
As an early scholar in this growing subfield (my first works on the history film date to the early eighties), I have long been involved in this question of whether or not, and if so, what, film, and its electronic siblings contribute to our understanding of past people, movements, and events, and to what extent the visual media move the definition of “history” in a new direction. For this paper, I will use my dual role as participant in and critical historian of this subfield in order to assess its current state and suggest possible future directions by analyzing the theories that have been proposed, and assessing the extent to which they overlap, or can be brought together to create a more unified notion of the role of the visual media in the future of our histories.
