Usage of history: the turn away from the political?

 For the past month I have taught a course on the usage of history. This is a rather Scandinavian/north European concept, since Anglo-Saxon literature would rather speak of for instance public history. In the north European schools there instead tend to be a focus of how the past is invoked in society, and why. 

As a political historian it would be rather obvious for me to mainly focus on how political parties or politicians have used history in my teaching. Yet this have actually not been the case. Instead most of my examples have been oriented towards the question of history in aesthetics, ranging from art to country songs. There are many reasons for this.

From a theoretical position I feel that history needs to be studied outside of politics. The basic idea is here that politics in the end is a reflection of wider society (or atleast it should be ideally), and that viewing usage of history in aesthetics therefore have great relevance also for politics. It is perhaps more likely that the framework for how history is allowed to be used is set within popular culture rather than in politics.

Another position is that political use of history is perhaps the most well studied version of usage is history. In Peter Aronssons book ”historiebruk” (usage of history) it is stated that the political use of history is what most historians studies within the field of usage of history. This was written in 2005, and whilst we since have seen several dissertations outside political use of history, it is still a field dominated by political history. An aspect for my teaching have hence been to challenge the ongoing trend. An effort which actually have rendered interesting results, since some of my students have highlighted that the study of art have been a welcome shift from the usual study of texts.

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