Are We Losing Interest in History?
Writing by Darrin Dickey on Monday, 23 of June , 2008 at 11:23 am
Here’s some intersting data I found by accident. Last week I was perusing one of Google Labs‘ projects, Google Trends. They compile search data from the last 4 1/2 years and reveal trends based on search terms. For instance, you can see trends for the search term “american history”, which is what I did. And after checking a few search terms, I came to realize that american history is taking a hit in the public consciousness - or at least in their searches. Keep in mind that this is in no way a scientific study and public interest in subjects is cyclical. Interests come and go in cycles. But overall, online interest in US history seems to be slipping away.
As a quick side note, the graphs included in this post are from Google Trends. The top blue line reflect the number of searches for a particular term from the beginning of 2004 until today. (The bottom blue line reflects news items reflecting the search term and aren’t really considered in this post.) The letters you see along the top blue line reflect the interest generated by certain online news stories.
Take for instance the search for american history (chart at beginning of post). As with all searches, you’ll see spikes in searches for this term (especially when some news event occured surrounding the subject, but the overall trend is down.
Likewise, here is a search for “United States history”. The trends is remarkably downward!
So, what if you search for specific places or events? Here’s one for Gettysburg.
And Antietam.
How about the Wright Brothers?
So, is the prognosis for history bleak? Not really. As I’ve said, interest in history is often cyclical and frequently spurred on by notable news, entertainment evens (such as Roots, Gettysburg and Cold Mountain). We’re just three years from the sesquicentennial of the Civil War (two if you start with secession in 1860). Furthermore, travel to historic sites is down due to economic woes, but that will turn around. Good historic site marketers should even be able to take advantage of this downturn and fuel pricing woes to lure in local visitors for “backyard vacations” that could save them travel dollars.
What are you doing to gin up interest in your site? Add a comment or drop us a line and tell us about it.
Category: Personal Observations
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Comment by Andy Walpole
Made Wednesday, 2 of July , 2008 at 5:10 am
I never thought of using Google trends before for this reason.
I take your point about history being cyclical and based around popular culture, but I’ve inputed Welsh history, Irish history, British history, Scottish history and even just history, and they’re all down from 2004 onwards…
That’s pretty odd… I need to think about all this.
Like your blog by the way… it’s an interesting and unusual take on humanities…
I’ll add it to History Nexus and the History Now Widget
Comment by Darrin Dickey
Made Wednesday, 2 of July , 2008 at 3:50 pm
Andy,
I have a suspicion that with global tensions ratcheted up over wars, economies, gas prices, etc., people find themselves too consumed in these other subjects to pay much attention to history. (There’s got to be some irony there….)
I do believe when the general malaise improves, interest will pick up again. In the mean time, I hope historic organizations are trying to take advantage of the fact that people are looking for new and interesting things to do near home and trying to entice those people to their products.
