Does the Past Have a Future?

The past is everywhere today, or so it seems. For Canadians in the 1990s it started in miniature—the Heritage Minutes, sponsored by a private philanthropic foundation—and continued in 2000 in the large economy size—Canada: A People’s History, the mammoth multi-part series underwritten by the CBC. An entire television network is devoted to it, the History Channel (The Real Pirates of the Caribbean), while, over on PBS, Ken Burns’s immensely popular and instructive trilogy of American history (The Civil War, Baseball and Jazz) has been followed by Prohibition, turning it into a tetralogy. And that is just the documentary approach. Mining the past for lurid entertainment, television has brought us The Tudors and The Borgias (hot history) and, currently on HBO giving Ken Burns a run for his money, Boardwalk Empire about prohibition in Atlantic City.

The past is also at the local...