SOURCE: “Searching for an Audience: The Historical Profession in the Media Age—A Comment on Arthur Marwick and Hayden White,” in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, January, 1996, pp. 215–19.

In the following essay, Kansteiner discusses the different historiographic perspectives of Marwick and White, and suggests that a new historiographic approach is needed to deal with questions raised by popular visual media, notably films and documentaries.

The exchange of arguments between Arthur Marwick and Hayden White, published in recent issues of this Journal, is certainly not remarkable for having introduced new perspectives into the debate about the relationship between academic historiographical practice, postmodern theory, and the possibility or threat of a vaguely conceived postmodern historiography. During the two decades that historians and critics have discussed these issues, little progress in terms of clarification and mutual enlightenment has been made. Most of the exchanges are noteworthy for their polemics and...