Historical Analogies and Historical Consciousness: User-Generated History Lessons on TikTok

Abstract

As a major social media platform, TikTok also serves as a means for communicating about the past. Analyzing TikTok videos that feature the hashtags #historytiktok, #historymemes, and #historylesson, this chapter shows how TikTok’s platform affordances stimulate drawing analogies between present and past. Because TikToks are multimodal and allow for the use of audio, video, and historical analogies on the platform are condensed compared to traditional text-based analogies, from which they differ in three ways. They allow the simultaneous presentation of the analogy’s base and target in different modes; they allow drawing double analogies that compare three elements rather than two; and they favor analogies that use the present to understand the past. The chapter calls for a revaluation of historical analogies in the study of historical consciousness and in history education.