other countries

First things first: due to demand, I've created an email address for my biographers. If you'd like to contribute to their efforts, please send images, stories, and memories to apm.biography@gmail.com. Your work will not go unnoticed.

I was reading earlier in an article on the heritage industry by Robert Hewison: "Steam is now safely part of the industrial heritage, let nuclear power adopt the same camouflage." This is something that's been on my mind lately, not so much energy, but the ways in which commodifying history hides the present, so that going on tours of 18th century prisons hides the presence of incarceration in our present states; touring Victorian warships disguises the ways in which the British (or American) military is being deployed around the world; displays of dead states hide the real and present states. This isn't my feeling about history as a discipline, not at all, but I do feel that way about the different exhibits I've gone to here. And I am really blind to the present, I have no idea about prisons and the justices or injustices that are taking place in them.

And yet I wonder if that's a fair dichotomy to make, between commodified and uncommodified history. If there's a history article, journal, or book that I'm reading, it's because its publication was considered to be economically beneficial. This isn't to say that the writers are making a ton of money, because they are certainly not except in rare cases, or even that publishers are necessarily making a ton of money (I'm guessing, but not sure, that academic presses make less profits than popular presses). But, I would be shocked if anyone published what they thought wouldn't sell, and what would have no demand (hence, books go out of print). History, like everything else, has to be juicy and commodified, or it will never become public (unless the blogosphere erupts with historians). I'm not necessarily comfortable with thinking about everything in these terms, but I am becoming much more fascinated at the intersections between money, power, and knowledge, in all areas of knowledge (replace 'history' with 'science' in this last paragraph, and it would probably be able to stand up unrevised, for instance). Maybe for that reason, I'm becoming really interested in the publishing industry throughout its existence. even before the publishing industry, what has been considered to be worthy of replication and dissemination.