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There is remarkable consensus among both historians and media critics regarding television's unsuitability for the construction of history. Notwithstanding the History Channel's original promise to provide access to" All of History—All in One Place," TV viewers are often characterized as victims in an epidemic of cultural amnesia for which television is both disease and carrier. TV, so the argument goes, can produce no lasting sense of history; at worst, it actually impedes viewers' ability to receive, process, or remember information about the past. Raymond Williams' theorization of the" flow" of televisual discourse is invoked to argue that the contents of television simply rush by like answers on the Jeopardy! board, without context or opportunity for retention. For Stephen Heath, television produces" forgetfulness, not memory, flow, not history. If there is history, it is congealed, already past and distant and forgotten other …