TY - JOUR TI - Small screen histories: presenting the past on American television, 1949-2017 DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-whvp-y891 PY - 2019 AB - Small Screen Histories examines the diverse ways that producers of television documentaries and docudramas have packaged American history for TV audiences since the earliest days of the medium. History-themed television programs have become quite popular in the last few decades, a phenomenon that is usually traced to the broadcast of Ken Burns’s The Civil War in 1990 and the launch of the History Channel in 1995. My research takes up questions of interpretation, ideology, narrative, genre, economics, race, class, and gender across five noteworthy series: Crusade in Europe (1949), CBS’s You Are There (1953-1957), and ABC’s Roots (1977), as well as Ken Burns’s The Civil War and The Vietnam War (2017). Though there have been many excellent scholarly analyses of history programs on television, my dissertation is the first to take an historical perspective, examining how television filmmakers have created usable pasts that speak to concerns about capitalism, liberal internationalism, democracy, McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the polarization of domestic politics. KW - Television KW - Communication, Information and Library Studies KW - Historical television programs -- United States -- Criticism and interpretation KW - Television and history LA - English ER -