This book maps out the enormous repository that is “television as historian” into manageable and analytically useful categories, such as prime-time entertainment programming, the historical documentary, and TV news and public affairs; and seeks to establish quality criteria and levels of merit for television as “popular history,” rather than judging it by the very different yardstick of professional history, or just dismissing the entire phenomenon as hopelessly flawed and ahistorical.
 
Any constructive evaluation of “television as historian” needs to start with the assumption that it is an entirely new and different kind of history altogether.  Unlike written discourse, the language of TV is highly stylized, elliptical (rather than linear) in structure, and associational or metaphoric in the ways in which it portrays images and ideas.  A key goal of this collection of essays is to better understand television as a popular art form, an evolving technology, a business and industry, and a social force of international proportions, all from a wide assortment of well-tried and effective historical-critical perspectives.  Television Histories appeared on the University Press Bestsellers list in November 2001 (14th out of the top 25) and December 2001 (23rd out of the top 25).
 
Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age.  Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2001; Paperback Edition, 2003. (with Peter C. Rollins). (*Winner of the 2001 Ray B. Browne National Book Award).