The success of popularization accounts on social networks has inspired the French university sphere. Since the start of the 2022 school year, three Masters have been offering students to train “History for the general public”.
by adelaide Tenaglia
Understand a thesis in the political appropriation of the figure of the goddess Athena in the 19th century in the 19th century. Return to the death of Anastasia Romanov in a twelve -minute video. Trace the history of retirement in France thanks to a series of tweets. In recent years, this type of content that has been popular in short and pop formats have multiplied on social networks.
This practice has a name: “public history”. The discipline from the United States, proposes to bring the story out of its academic framework to make it accessible to the general public, without losing anything from its scientific acuity. In France, she first developed without saying her name, in media as the monthly review History, the radio program “La Fabrique de l’Histoire”, on France Culture, or in documentaries at television then on social networks. But, in 2015, public history became a real academic discipline with the opening of a specific master at the Paris-Est-Créteil University (UPEC). Seven years after its creation, it receives a hundred applications for twelve places in M1 and twenty in M2 each year.
Inspired by the latter and by the multiplication of historical popularization content on social networks, two new masters of public history opened in September 2022, at the National University Institute Champollion, in Albi, and in Nantes University. “We realized that history students went less naturally to the library to find out about a subject, but rather about their podcast or YouTube application. We could not miss this trend,” admits Sandrine Victor, Mistress of conferences in medieval history at the Albi Institute and Co -responsible for the brand new master of public history.
escape teaching
Because the phenomenon has become essential. On YouTube, the historic popularization chain of Benjamin Brillaud, “Note Bene”, exceeded two million subscribers in the summer of 2022. He did not study history, but he is assisted by Historians to write your videos. The most popular, on sex in the Middle Ages, reached 8.5 million views. To name a few, Charlie Danger’s chain, “world journals”, approaches the million subscribers (940,000), and that of Manon Champier, “it’s another story”, exceeds 650,000 , with several videos to one or two million views. Many students have also heard for the first time in public history … by watching a video of the “Note” channel.
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