In the wake of today's heightened attention to some of the more “problematic” features of American identity – from the public presence of despicable memorials and monuments, to the apparent national consensus that opinions are facts and truth is what we believe – History Comes Alive is both a timely and a welcome book. In six lucid and informed chapters, M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska explains how in the 1970s American ideas about history changed from textbook narratives of a dusty and remote past to more affective understandings of the past as a panoply of felt experiences informed by emotionally engaged forms of public history and popular culture.

American attention to the past, she writes, was different in the 1970s, shifting from a postwar emphasis on futurity and optimistic expectations of a better world of tomorrow to widely shared interests in interactive and immersive programs and practices by which Americans might “know and feel the experiences of historical individuals” (4). Many critics maligned this looking backward as the passive indulgence of cultural nostalgia, worried that predilections for the past signaled escapist, antimodern, and even antidemocratic tendencies. Rymsza-Pawlowska argues that it heralded instead a new form of historical consciousness by which Americans aimed to identify and assess themselves, and America, on more authentic, active, and reformist terms. The consequences of this new consciousness are with us today as Americans understand history less in terms of specific dates and eras, or particular economic, legal, and social policies, or the institutional workings of the nation-state, than as personal experiences and public feelings that are seemingly more real, more valid.

History “came alive” in the 1970s in multiple settings, perhaps most obviously in the myriad celebrations surrounding the American Bicentennial in 1976. Television programs, museum exhibits, historic preservation efforts, and reenactments – each covered in a chapter of this book – also contributed to the decade's growing focus on historical engagement. Every night for two years, from 4 July 1974 to 4 July 1976, CBS broadcast a segment called Bicentennial Minute: a sixty-second educational factoid, narrated by celebrities including Alan Alda, Lucille Ball, Betty Ford, and Leonard Nimoy and sponsored by Shell Oil, that looked back two hundred years to a historical event or person from the American Revolution deemed worthy of remembrance to contemporary viewers. Seven hundred bicentennial history lessons were aired, each aligned with CBS producer Lewis Freedman's notions of the constructed terms of both television and history: “It seemed to me that television is an ideal medium to handle history because like history, it goes on every day very slowly. We decided to do a minute a day to show the process of history” (14). Historically themed television shows and miniseries that aired during the 1970s, including The Waltons (1971–81), Little House on the Prairie (1974–83), and Roots (broadcast over eight nights in January 1977), were similarly organized on processual terms, suggesting the unfolding, rather than the fixity, of the American past, and hence its potential for connecting with the modern present.

Roots, in particular, was an enormous cultural phenomenon, with more than 51 percent of the US viewing public tuning in to ABC to watch the final installment of the miniseries on January 30 (still a Nielsen record). The show's focus on individuals like Kunta Kinte as historical agents, writes Rymsza-Pawlowska, helped transform “popular ideas about the power of television and American ideas about race” (35). In the years after Roots aired, the National Archives and other repositories saw record numbers of visitors seeking to discover their historical origins. The escalation of genealogical research, on the upswing again today with increasing numbers of Americans signing up for DNA testing through companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe, can be traced to how new understandings of a “personalized, identificatory” history took hold in the 1970s (38).

Chapters on federal plans for the Bicentennial, changed understandings about the role and purpose of historical preservation – including new ideas about whose history should be preserved – the advent of interactive and experiential museum exhibitions, and the explosion of new modes and sites of “embodied history” that involved both “reenactors and audiences” (122), further substantiate these shifts in historical consciousness during the 1970s. History museums, for example, took advantage of technological innovations that allowed visitors to converse with tape recordings of historical personalities. Oral-history projects dramatically expanded during the decade and, parallel with new directions in social history, increasingly focussed on the lives of ordinary Americans. And various activists, including a group called the Fourth of July Coalition which consisted of representatives from the American Indian Movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Weather Underground, marshaled the decade's newly inclusive, participatory, and immersive understandings of history to demand social and political change. During much of its thirteen-year run (1967–80), the Black Panther, for example, the house organ of the Black Panther Party, ran a weekly column called “This Week in Black History” which simultaneously highlighted African American achievements and exposed ongoing oppression, and placed the party's social and political aspirations “within the history of revolution” (155). Rymsza-Pawlowska's insightful attention to these and other examples makes this story of how history came alive in 1970s America compelling and convincing.