Run BASH built-in commands in Python?

I finally found a solution that works.

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE, STDOUT
shell_command = 'bash -i -c "history -r; history"'
event = Popen(shell_command, shell=True, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE, 
    stderr=STDOUT)

output = event.communicate()

Thank you everyone for the input.