Issue 6 – AHR Forum

Uploaded 16 April 1999   Robert Rosenstone's essay raises at least two questions that should be of eminent concern to professional historians. The first is that of the relative adequacy…

Uploaded 18 April 1999 First published American Historical Review 93, no.5 (December 1988): 1173-1185 For an academic historian to become involved in the world of motion pictures is at once an exhilarating…

Uploaded 16 April 1999 When the American Historical Review published a special forum on film and history all those who had long contended that cinema was an important source for the study…

Uploaded 16 April 1999 |   As the centenary of the cinema has come and gone, and the Internet arrived on the scene, it is appropriate to ask what has…

Uploaded 16 April 1999 History decomposes into images, not into narratives. - Walter Benjamin [W]hat proliferates in historical discourse are elements "below which nothing more can be done except display,"…

Uploaded 16 April 1999 Two books published in 1997 testify to the epistemological upheaval taking place within the historical profession. In Deconstructing History , Alan Munslow argues that "Because today we doubt…

Uploaded 16 April 1999 The 1997 Italian film, Porzus (dir. Renzo Martinelli) has been advertised as portraying, "La faccia sporca della Resistenza." [1] Why is the language of cleanliness and filth invoked…

Uploaded 16 April 1999 In this essay I would like to consider some of the ramifications of a widely accepted yet undertheorized idea: that the preeminence of the moving image…

Uploaded 16 April 1999 Films set in ancient Rome have often drawn the laughter, if not the outright contempt, of classicists. Why should classicists bother themselves with the inanities of…

Uploaded 16 April 1999 Begin at the beginning. Which beginning? The 1988 AHR Forum. A historical mistake or an idea whose time had come. A breakthrough into a new field or the…