Stop Letting Old White Men Decide What Counts as History

Why pop music, fashion, fandom and everyday culture belong in the historical record.

I have largely given up on TikTok. There is excellent work on the platform, but its basic machinery rewards whatever keeps people watching and arguing, and outrage is remarkably efficient at both. Videos like the one I am discussing here are part of why I no longer treat the app as a place for sustained thought. The point is often less to make an argument than to toss a lit match into the comments and collect the engagement.

Still, rage bait can occasionally be useful when it stumbles into a question I have been meaning to discuss anyway. A bad argument, stated with enough confidence, can clarify all the assumptions sitting underneath it.

This one certainly did.

“Michael Jackson was never in my history classes.”

That was apparently offered as evidence that Michael Jackson is not historically significant, rather than as a devastating review of those history classes.

The video distinguishes sales records from “historical records,” allows that the Beatles might matter because they “did a first thing,” and insists that Taylor Swift will not be remembered in 500 years the way we remember Pompeii or Alexander the Great. “In the larger scheme of things,” the creator concludes, “Taylor Swift does not matter.”

At that point, we are no longer talking only about Taylor Swift. We are talking about who gets to decide what counts as history, why wars, rulers and catastrophes are treated as inherently significant, and why music, magazines, fashion, fandom, domestic life and mass culture must drag themselves before the tribunal and prove that they belong.

We are talking about the difference between the past and the carefully selected portion of it that most of us encountered in school.

Because “I didn’t learn about it in history class” is not evidence that something was historically unimportant. It is evidence that somebody decided not to teach it.

The syllabus did not descend from heaven

This is not really an article about whether Taylor Swift will be remembered in the year 2526. I have no idea. Neither does anyone else. Historians are not bookmakers placing odds on the future survival of celebrity reputations.

Nor am I arguing that Taylor Swift is the greatest artist who has ever lived, that every pop single deserves a dedicated museum wing, or that students should be required to master the complete history of the Eras Tour before anyone lets them near the Roman Empire.

You are entirely free to dislike her music, her business decisions, her politics, her fans, her private jets, or the way she has become a permanent weather system hovering above the internet. None of that answers the question of whether something not being in a historical textbook means it doesn’t deserve to be there.

A school curriculum is not a neutral inventory of everything that mattered. It is a selection shaped by limited teaching time, examination requirements, political pressures, national priorities and inherited assumptions about what students are supposed to know. Choices have to be made, but those choices do not emerge naturally from the past.

For generations, women appeared in history lessons when they married, advised, inspired, distracted or were murdered by important men. Black history appeared around slavery and civil rights, frequently arranged around the actions of white presidents. Indigenous people encountered European settlers and then mysteriously evaporated. Queer people apparently sprang fully formed from the pavement outside Stonewall in 1969.

Workers arrived when they went on strike. Disabled people appeared when a famous person heroically “overcame” something. Ordinary families briefly materialised during discussions of census records before returning to the historical mist.

We do not conclude that all these people were insignificant because somebody’s secondary-school course failed to mention them. We recognise that the course was missing a considerable amount of history.

I have spent entire lectures encouraging students to question the reliability of their textbooks, especially when a dubious throwaway line turns out to be an old political insult repeated so often that it has hardened into fact. A textbook is a secondary source produced by people, institutions and editorial decisions. It should be read critically, not carried down a mountain on stone tablets.

The same is true of the curriculum built around it.

History did not arrive with a table of contents attached.

Who made “serious history” serious?

The professional historical discipline developed its own hierarchy of respectable subjects. Governments, diplomacy, military campaigns, legislation, empires and prominent political actors occupied the upper floors, while most of the things human beings spent their actual lives doing were placed somewhere below stairs.

People worked, cooked, cared for children, shopped, worshipped, read, listened to music, dressed themselves, flirted, formed families and developed furious opinions about people they would never meet. The past did not consist entirely of presidents signing documents while generals waited nearby for their chapter, although many textbooks have worked heroically to create that impression.

Bonnie Smith’s The Gender of History examines the construction of professional history in the nineteenth century and the way supposedly scientific historical practice became associated with masculine authority. Historical writing by women, particularly work concerned with manners, social life, customs and personal experience, could be dismissed as amateur or sentimental while political history acquired the armour of objectivity. The division between “serious history” and the decorative bits already had a gender.

This was more than a disagreement over research interests. It established a hierarchy of human experience in which the state was consequential and the home incidental, war was serious and leisure was fluff, while elite men exercised power and ordinary people merely lived somewhere in its vicinity.

Women’s history, Black history, labour history, queer history and cultural history did not simply add a more diverse cast to an otherwise complete story. They challenged the structure of the story itself.

Joan Scott’s argument for gender as a category of historical analysis was not a request to insert several notable women between the important men. Gender could explain the construction of citizenship, labour, family, authority and political power. It altered the questions historians asked and the answers they could see.

History from below similarly asked how political and economic changes were experienced by workers and ordinary communities. Cultural historians turned toward language, ritual, memory, representation and media, not because politics had ceased to matter, but because people encounter politics through culture. Ideas about nation, race, gender and authority do not remain politely confined to parliaments and courtrooms. They circulate through stories, performances, advertisements, songs and the assumptions of everyday life.

The point was never to decorate political history with a few songs and aprons. It was to recognise that political history cannot explain a society by itself.

Somebody also built the archive

The historical canon was reinforced by the archive. Governments generated enormous paper trails, including laws, tax records, military reports, diplomatic correspondence and official memoranda. Prominent men donated their letters, and institutions preserved those materials because the people who created them were already considered important.

Domestic labour rarely produced a neatly labelled archival box. Neither did neighbourhood gossip, oral culture, working-class leisure, girls’ bedrooms, informal economies or the emotional lives of ordinary people. Marginalised communities were less likely to have their records preserved by institutions that did not consider them proper historical actors in the first place.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past remains indispensable because it shows how historical silence is produced at several stages. It occurs when sources are created, when archives are assembled, when narratives are written and when later generations decide which stories deserve commemoration. Power does not enter history only when someone burns the evidence. It is already present in the decision about what counts as evidence at all.

What institutions recorded became what archives preserved. What archives preserved became what historians could most easily study, and what historians repeatedly studied became what schools taught. By the time that chain reached the classroom, generations of human choices had hardened into something that looked like objective importance.

The American Library here in Norwich has a valuable collection in their archive. An accessible back catalogue of American magazines, material that might otherwise be scattered across institutions, locked behind databases or simply gone.

Magazines are glorious historical gossips. They tell us what companies wanted people to buy, what editors imagined readers wanted, which bodies were displayed, which fears could be stated openly and which desires had to be smuggled between the lines. They preserve advertising, fashion, political language, celebrity culture, domestic advice and endless instructions for women on how to rearrange themselves for everybody else’s convenience.

They are also the sort of material that was designed to be temporary. Yesterday’s magazine becomes wrapping paper, rubbish, a drawer lining or a casualty of someone deciding that nobody needs fourteen years of Ladies’ Home Journal taking up space in the loft.¹

We can study twentieth-century popular culture partly because someone kept it.

The nineteenth century offers plenty of popular culture too, but the further back we go, the harder everyday cultural material often becomes to recover. That does not mean earlier people lacked songs, fashions, performers, stories, games, jokes or collective obsessions. It means their culture was more likely to be oral, ephemeral or considered too trivial to preserve.

An absence in the archive may tell us less about what ordinary people valued than about what archivists were taught to value. The archive is not a divine warehouse containing everything that mattered. It is a collection of human decisions, limited budgets, institutional priorities, cataloguing systems, dust and at least one box nobody has opened since 1974.

Popular culture is partial, just like every other historical source

When I sent the video to friends, one of them raised a fair qualification. Popular culture is one aspect of history. It can reveal the attitudes, fashions and concerns of particular generations or audiences, but it cannot stand in for the whole of society.

Absolutely. Neither can anything else.

A Cabinet memorandum does not represent an entire society. It tells us what certain officials discussed, what they were prepared to commit to paper and what they wanted preserved in the official record. A newspaper reflects its owners, editors, advertisers, writers and intended readers. A census takes millions of complicated human beings and presses them into categories devised by the state. A court judgment tells us what judges ruled, not automatically how ordinary people experienced the law, interpreted it or cheerfully found ways around it.

Historians do not discard these sources because they are partial. We ask who produced them, for whom, under what conditions and for what purpose.

Popular culture deserves the same basic competence.

A pop song may illuminate a particular market, generation, subculture or audience. It may exclude people, distort reality or emerge from a corporation whose devotion to artistic truth lasted exactly as long as the quarterly earnings call. None of that makes it useless. It makes it evidence.

Stuart Hall resisted treating popular culture as either the uncorrupted voice of “the people” or meaningless material poured into passive consumers by capitalism. The popular is contested territory where commercial power, tradition, pleasure, interpretation, incorporation and resistance collide.

Sometimes a pop song challenges the dominant culture. Sometimes it reinforces it. Sometimes it manages both before the second chorus.

Culture and policy are not positioned on a tidy conveyor belt either, with culture occurring first and “real history” arriving ten years later as legislation. Cultural narratives help determine which policies seem acceptable, dangerous, moral or necessary, while policy shapes who can produce culture, where it circulates and what can safely be said.

I have used music in my own women’s-history teaching for precisely this reason. In one course, I gave students a playlist and asked them to choose a song, research it and connect it to the wider themes of the class. This was not a temporary abandonment of scholarship in favour of karaoke. A song can carry arguments about gender, sexuality, work, race, citizenship and power.

Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill,” for example, belongs in the history of contraception whether or not anyone’s textbook gave it a paragraph. The song opens questions about marriage, reproductive autonomy, country music, censorship, class and the different standards imposed on male and female performers. Its reception also shows how reliable contraception was understood, celebrated and feared.

The law tells us that contraception became available. The song tells us what it sounded like when a working-class woman celebrated having some control over her reproductive life, and why a substantial portion of the country reacted as though she had driven a contraceptive-filled bulldozer through the American family.

Both are history.

“Sales records. Not historical records.”

This may be my favourite part of the argument because historians have occasionally been known to study commerce.

Rather a lot, in fact.

Prices, wages, shipping manifests, household inventories, advertisements, trade figures, company accounts, tax records and consumer surveys are all historical evidence. Nobody examines the East India Company and announces that it only sold things, so unfortunately there is nothing historical to discuss.

Commerce does not cease to be history when the product has a chorus.

Sales records can reveal who possessed disposable income, which markets companies pursued, how technology altered distribution, which cultural forms moved across borders and which audiences had enough collective economic power to reshape an industry. “People bought it” is not the conclusion of a historical investigation. It is where the questions begin.

Who produced it? Who owned it? Who profited? What labour disappeared behind the finished product? How was demand created? Which consumers were imagined in the marketing, and which were excluded? What technology allowed millions of people to hear the same recording? What did audiences do with it after they bought it?

The history of popular music runs through radio, records, cassettes, television, music video, portable players, digital downloads, streaming platforms, algorithms, copyright, touring infrastructure and ticketing monopolies. These are transformations in capitalism, labour, technology and communications. Calling them “just sales” does not make them disappear.

Michael Jackson is an obvious example, especially since this video chose to invoke him. His career raises historical questions about racial barriers in broadcasting, the global recording industry, childhood labour, music video, dance, masculinity, celebrity and media surveillance. None of this requires historians to declare him a good person, because historical significance is not sainthood. Historians study emperors, corporations and governments without issuing certificates confirming that they were delightful company.

Jackson’s Thriller was added to the National Recording Registry in 2007. The Library of Congress preserves recordings judged culturally, historically or aesthetically significant, and its essay on Thriller discusses the album’s enormous effect on the sound, image and consumption of popular music.

The Billboard list, the sales, the music videos and the audience all belong to that history. The fact that Michael Jackson did not appear in one person’s school course proves only that the course did not cover twentieth-century media history.

History is not an awards ceremony for being first

The video allows that the Beatles might be historically significant because they “did a first thing,” while Taylor Swift apparently “will never be a first.”

This is Great Man history wearing a novelty hat.

Firsts can matter, but they are also an unreliable way to organise the past. “The first” depends on how an achievement is defined, which sources survive and who possesses the authority to recognise it. The person celebrated as the first may really be the first to receive a patent, attract commercial investment, reach a white market or have their name preserved by a powerful institution.

A first is often simply the first person the archive noticed.

The plaque on the wall then obscures the predecessors, collaborators, communities and traditions that made the achievement possible. One heroic individual marches into history while everyone who taught them, influenced them, assisted them or accomplished something similar without recognition is pushed behind a curtain.

Historical change also occurs through adaptation, scale, synthesis, circulation and reception. A person can transform a cultural form without inventing it. Audiences can alter the meaning of a work, while a new distribution system or business decision can restructure an entire industry.

No musician creates themselves in a sealed laboratory. Popular music develops through migration, community, technology, imitation, collaboration, borrowing and appropriation. History becomes remarkably thin when we study only whoever received the ceremonial badge marked FIRST and ignore everybody who built the road leading to it.

Pop music is also Black history

Any argument that pop music is historically unimportant collapses particularly quickly once race enters the room.

Blues, jazz, rock and roll, soul, disco, R&B and hip-hop cannot be separated from Black history. Black communities created musical forms that were repeatedly dismissed as dangerous, vulgar or unserious before industries repackaged them as national culture.

The music mattered enormously, even when its creators were denied equal ownership, profit, protection or credit.

Tricia Rose’s Black Noise situated hip-hop within the economic conditions, racial politics, technology and urban life of the 1970s and 1980s Bronx. Rap was not decorative noise playing behind urban history. It was created within that history by Black young people living amid systemic neglect and disenfranchisement.

Daphne Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution examines Black women musicians, listeners and critics as intellectual and historical actors while asking who has been authorised to write, collect and canonise the history of music. Black women can be central to the culture industry and still be marginalised within the stories told about that industry.

This is one of the uglier habits of the traditional canon. It extracts enormous cultural value from marginalised communities while refusing to treat those communities as serious producers of knowledge. Black music becomes part of national identity while Black musicians are flattened into entertainment. Women’s creativity becomes profitable while women’s audiences are treated as irrational. Working-class culture becomes heritage after the working-class people who made it have been politely removed from the gift shop.

Music also has an obvious political history. Songs have circulated through labour organising, war, migration, election campaigns, civil-rights activism and social protest. The Library of Congress’s Songs of America collection uses music to explore work, immigration, political campaigns, reform, conflict and leisure for exactly this reason.

A history that records the law but not the songs people sang while demanding that the law change has left out rather a lot.

Apparently, the things women like do not count

The dismissal of Taylor Swift depends partly on the claim that people buy her music because they are “attached to her personality.” This is supposed to prove that nothing historically meaningful is happening.

To a cultural historian, it sounds like a research proposal.

Why do audiences develop emotional relationships with public figures? How is that sense of intimacy constructed through recordings, interviews, concerts and social media? How is it monetised? How do fans use celebrity narratives to interpret their own lives? Why are some forms of intense cultural knowledge treated as expertise while others become evidence of collective derangement?

Popular culture associated with women and girls has always been forced to prove its value independently of the people who value it. Young women’s enthusiasm becomes evidence that the object itself must be shallow, manufactured or embarrassing, even as their economic power is courted, exploited and cited as proof that they have terrible taste.

Male-dominated fandoms are more readily translated into expertise, collecting, connoisseurship or serious subculture. A man who remembers decades of football statistics is knowledgeable, while a young woman who can trace lyrical themes, production changes and visual references across an artist’s career has apparently been manipulated by a sinister marketing operation.

Interesting how that keeps happening.

Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber challenged a similar problem in early research on youth subcultures. Scholars searched for meaningful cultural activity in male-dominated public spaces, found boys there and concluded that boys were the principal creators of subculture. Girls’ cultural lives, often located in bedrooms, dance halls, magazines, friendships and domestic settings, remained harder to see because researchers had already decided where significant culture happened.

The same blindness appears whenever soap operas, romance novels, fashion, boy bands, celebrity magazines or female-dominated online fandoms are dismissed as fluff.

The subject does not have to be admirable, the fans do not have to behave rationally and the industry does not have to be benevolent. Historians have never imposed those requirements on war and yet every bookstore has approximately 70 tonnes of 500 page books detailing various wars in increasingly granular detail.

When millions of people build rituals, communities, identities, interpretations and economies around a cultural form, something historically meaningful is happening. Dismissing it as stupid does not make it insignificant. It simply exposes the elitism beneath the dismissal.

To say that popular culture does not matter is to say that the interests, pleasures and creative expressions of most human beings are historical clutter. People may sing, dance, collect, imitate, desire, argue and construct whole communities through culture, but apparently none of this becomes history until a government regulates it or an important man walks into the room.

Taylor Swift does not have to defeat Alexander the Great

Again, none of this proves that Taylor Swift will remain famous for 500 years. She does not have to.

Historians study failed campaigns, forgotten products, obscure organisations, short-lived fashions, local customs and ordinary people who never became famous at all. Sometimes brevity is exactly what makes a subject revealing. A moral panic that lasted two years can expose what a society feared, while a magazine published for six months can show what its readers desired. A song that vanished from public memory can illuminate a migration, a protest movement or a changing idea of respectability.

History is not a prize awarded to whatever remains famous longest.

Long-term fame is not neutral anyway. Historical memory is cultivated through education, museums, monuments, archives, books, films and political institutions. Alexander the Great did not receive a permanent place in the curriculum directly from the universe. His prominence has been reproduced across centuries by institutions that continued to tell his story, then pointed to his familiarity as evidence that he naturally deserved the attention.

He matters because I learned about him in history class. I learned about him because he matters. Nobody stops to ask who wrote the class.

A historian could study Taylor Swift through genre, gendered authorship, celebrity branding, intellectual property, rerecording, streaming, touring, ticketing, parasocial relationships or the cultural treatment of female audiences. She does not need to have invented popular music, remain universally admired or outlive Pompeii.

The comparison with Pompeii is where the argument becomes particularly strange. Why would pop music have to appear in history “over” Vesuvius? Who proposed this exchange?

One commenter beneath the video gave the obvious answer:

“Who said over? There’s room in the history books for all history.”

Exactly.

There is not room for everything in every textbook, course or museum, and practical choices are unavoidable. But practical limits do not establish a natural hierarchy in which volcanoes are serious and music is frivolous.

History is not a cage match between Taylor Swift and Vesuvius. We do not have to drag Alexander the Great out of the archive and leave him on the pavement because someone wrote a dissertation about Beyoncé, nor will Pompeii vanish from the curriculum because a historian wants to know what Michael Jackson’s career reveals about race, television and global celebrity.

The scarcity is invented. It comes from an old model in which a limited number of worthy subjects are allowed through the gates, and popular culture must first defeat war, politics and catastrophe in single combat.²

The canon is not the past

“Michael Jackson was never in my history classes” does tell us something useful, although not what the speaker intended.

It tells us that many people received a narrow definition of history. Political and military narratives continue to dominate public ideas about historical seriousness, while commercial culture remains intellectually suspect despite commerce being central to virtually every major historical development. Women’s enthusiasm, meanwhile, still functions as evidence against whatever women happen to be enthusiastic about.

The old canon is still doing its work.

What the statement does not tell us is that Michael Jackson was historically insignificant, or that popular music somehow exists outside history.

Popular culture cannot explain every part of a society. Neither can a law, a census, a battle or a king. History requires all of them, read critically and placed in conversation with one another.

Popular music tells us who held power and who wanted it, who was heard and who was silenced, who performed the labour and who collected the profit. It shows us which bodies could appear onstage, which desires could be spoken aloud and which communities built worlds around a shared sound.

That is history.

Your history class was never the whole past. It was a guided tour written by people who kept us in the throne room and hurried us past the kitchen, the shop floor, the dance hall, the newsstand and the bedroom.

Those rooms were never empty.

We were simply taught not to look inside.

1. I am as guilty of this as anyone. I found my grandmother’s BOXES of Arizona Highways in her garage after she died and thought ‘well that’s going to take up a lot of space in the landfill.’

2. If it comes down to it, I would put my money on Swifties defeating the World War 2 history bros in hand to hand combat though.