I became a historian because of a television show. That is something I don’t often admit, but it’s true. I was home for Thanksgiving in 2009, nearly finished with my first semester as a journalism major, and I was miserable. To cope, I spent two days curled up on my parents’ couch watching the Band of Brothers marathon on Spike TV. I continued my engagement with the stories of Easy Company online, which consisted of both scholarly research and a deep dive into Camp Toccoa, a LiveJournal fanfiction community. In the midst of all this research, I rather obtusely exclaimed, “Duh! I can study history. I can write history. I can do history.”
I have always been fascinated by the ways everyday people pursue, consume, and produce historical content. Other historians have joined me in this inquiry. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s The Presence of the Past (1998) analyzed a landmark survey on popular forms of history making. One survey of selected Americans revealed that eighty-one percent of them watched historical movies or television programs that year. Historian M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska recently built off this work in History Comes Alive (2017), in which she demonstrated the impact of shows like Roots and Little House on the Prairie. More importantly, she discussed the 1970s shift toward the emotional production of historical knowledge, also called affective history making, when history “became as much about feeling as about thinking, about being inside the past instead of looking upon it.” This analysis provided the framework I needed to better understand my own experiences in historical fandoms on the internet. I wish to extend Rymsza-Pawlowska’s conversation even further by looking at the consumption and production of historical fanfiction in the 21st century as a form of affective history making.
Historical fandom refers to fanworks (stories, art, videos, memes, etc.) based on media that are set within or draw heavily from historical settings. If we look at statistics from Archive of Our Own (Ao3) — a leading site for fanfiction readers — we can see which historical fandoms people engage with the most. Ao3’s theater category contains more historical fanfiction than any other. The musicals Les Misérables and Hamilton have over 36,000 stories combined. The historical figures from Hamilton also fill the Historical Real Person Fiction (RPF) category, which are stories about real people, rather than fictional characters from various media. I typically poke around in historical fandoms for television shows and films. Some of the top TV historical fandoms on Ao3 are Black Sails, Downton Abbey, Timeless, Vikings, and HBO War (which includes Band of Brothers, The Pacific, and Generation Kill). As for films, it is impossible to ignore the prevalence of Captain America: The First Avenger. Historical fandom largely operates within the realm of these television programs and films because these stories are most accessible to the public, and they present fans with an emotional, not just factual, exploration of history. Fans can more easily empathize with characters and transform the canon (or the past) in a way that is personalized.