Embedded Files
Volume 4 | Issue 3 - History in the Public Eye
Article by Vela Decker. Edited and Researched by Tom Burke.
Have you ever found yourself asking how the Egyptian pyramids were built, how electricity was first discovered, how Nazi Germany developed weaponry or how dinosaurs became extinct? Have you considered the answer to all of these questions is ALIENS? No, me either. But this conclusion is exactly how the History Channel has come to explain basically everything in the past, with their forty-nine episodes of Ancient Aliens.
The channel is actually just called History now, after a major re-branding exercise in 2007, where it began a foray into reality TV and seemed to shift away from the past. Then, when programs like Ancient Aliens and Brad Meltzer’s Decoded started in 2010, some critics optimistically suggested that History was at least returning to a focus on the past. While I can see why some people feel any focus on making history popular is positive, programs like these make me a little deflated about the public perception of history.
I am not arguing the problems related to this channel are all recent. History was never part of some kind of golden age of popular history, never without sensationalism and never created with the sole desire of public education. Viewership and ratings have always mattered and anyone who watched the programs during the 90s probably still noticed Hitler getting more than his fair share of airtime.
I still argue there has been a change for the worse. My problem is not that the company fails to selflessly devote its airtime to only the most sober and educational endeavours. However, I do think what some of these programs suggest about the nature of history inquiry is incompatible with the stated goals of a company advocating programming that advances historical education.
Ancient Aliens presents ‘theories’ by ‘ancient alien theorists’ suggesting that evidence in history points to past contact between humans and extra-terrestrials. This is not just happening once either, intervention in human history is apparently something aliens have a bit of a compulsion towards. The development of sonar, radar, mathematics, religion, the legends of the Holy Grail, Medusa, Goliath, King Arthur, Bigfoot, the Bermuda triangle and the biblical story of Noah’s ark; all can now be explained in a satisfyingly simple and complete way by alien involvement. The phrase, ‘If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ has never made more sense to me. Apparently if you have ‘aliens did it’ as a historical explanation, every historical development starts looking like an extra-terrestrial encounter.
While the Ancient Aliens selling point seems to be explaining any why or how question that ever existed with one answer, Brad Meltzer’s Decoded involves the popular writer and a plucky group of companions showing how exciting history can be if you assume historical conspiracies and secrets are everywhere. Meltzer begins each episode by saying ‘What if I told you…’ and then going on to suggest his latest premise with a impressively straight face, like that Adolf Hitler possessed a ‘spear of destiny’ from the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, buried in the Antarctic so the Fourth Reich can rise after World War II.
Interestingly, credentials do not have to be misrepresented for the people explaining concepts in either program, because academic work is not presented positively anyway. The Ancient Aliens world is mainly populated by those labelled as authors, radio hosts, or just ‘alien investigators.’ For example, in a premise in Decoded questioning whether John Wilkes Booth was caught after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, some explanations are given by the great-great granddaughter of John Wilkes Booth’s aunt. Both programs consider basically portray experts as part of a ‘mainstream’ that is either actively conspiring to hide the ‘truth’ or biased and unable to think ‘outside the box’ (in this case, the area outside the proverbial box is seems riddled with aliens).
Both programs suggest an unhelpful idea that in the subject of history, any gap in knowledge is a weakness and wide open for literally any explanation that fill this gap. This exploits non-ideological historical work, since if historians cannot guarantee one hundred percent that ‘X’ event happened a certain way, ‘alien theorists’ can put forward any claim they want and suggest it as a reasonable possibility. In absence of guaranteed ‘fact’, these programs suggest that history boils down to a matter of opinion and that rejection of this opinion suggests a ‘mainstream’ agenda.
History has a program called ‘Save our History’, an outreach to further history education and supplement classroom history lessons. This involves lesson plans and study guides based on original television programs, suggested to make history more exciting for students. I simply think there should be more obligation to provide programs based on the best available historical knowledge, or History should just stop committing to provide educational, non-fiction programming.
For me, it is not about whether students watch a program on an ‘educational’ channel and fail a test by writing that dinosaurs became extinct because of aliens (although that would be unfortunate).The problem is more is about showing the way history is analysed and how evidence, reliable sources and expertise are evaluated. Many historians disagree on the exact way these issues should be presented anyway, but very few would approve of the Ancient Aliens method of historical inquiry. On the other hand, for anyone itching to discover how extra-terrestrials aided Nazis in developing time/space travel; I know this program you will love.
Research
The History Channel began in 1995 and has channels in many countries, including America, Canada, Egypt, Germany and the UK. Its name was changed to ‘History’ in 2008 and came with a change of logo. While previously being criticised for being too focused on WWII, current criticism tends towards its non-historical programming. Several programmes aired by History have been heavily criticised for the lack of historical information involved, Brian Switek describing Ancient Aliens as “some of the most noxious sludge in television’s bottomless chum bucket” while Peter Lemesurier described the Nastradamus series, focusing on the 2012 apocalypse, as “lurid nonsense.
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