The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History PDF Download

Author: David Lowenthal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521635622
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Heritage has burgeoned over the past quarter of a century from a small élite preoccupation into a major popular crusade. Everything from Disneyland to the Holocaust Museum, from the Balkan wars to the Northern Irish Troubles, from Elvis memorabilia to the Elgin Marbles bears the marks of the cult of heritage. In this acclaimed book David Lowenthal explains the rise of this new obsession with the past and examines its power for both good and evil.'Timely and provocative...brilliant and stimulating pyrotechnic...everything from the Pilgrim Fathers to the Inuits, from Homer's Greece to the rainforests of Brazil.' Roy Strong, The Sunday Times'...entertaining and enthralling...' Ben Pimlott, The Guardian

Author: David Lowenthal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1044

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Book Description
"Heritage is a most compelling modern cause. In the last quarter century it has expanded from a small elite pastime to a major popular crusade - a crusade to save and celebrate anything and all that we inherit from the past. Everything - from Euro-Disney to the Holocaust Museum, from Balkan enmities to the Northern Irish troubles, from Elvis memorabilia to the Elgin marbles - bears the marks of the cult of heritage. Heritage attachments pervade politics and education and form our views on such diverse realms as heredity, environment, racism, and tourism." "Enthralled by the past, we deploy it for present benefits of every kind. A goodly heritage persuades us we belong to a community of like-minded folk and act within a tradition sanctified by age-old experience. Heritage is all the more valued in a world where turbulent change and global fears make the present seem frightful and the future fearsome. Yet the very zeal with which heritage is pursued leads to countless abuses of the treasured past. Roots and relics become weapons to foment hatred of others, to warp historical truth, to deform our own legacy, to further some class or cause. Despite new recognition that the world's diverse legacies belong to and require the care of all mankind, heritage passions remain animated largely by self-regarding chauvinism." "In Possessed by the Past, David Lowenthal explains the rise of this new obsession with the past and shows its power for both good and evil. He probes the passions that generate a need to find or invent a prideful past - or to mourn a grievous one - and shows how they are similar the world over. He demonstrates why and how relics, ancestry, and memory today, more than ever, become a source of both pride and peril."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author: David Lowenthal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521851424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 679

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Book Description
A completely updated new edition of David Lowenthal's classic account of how we reshape the past to serve present needs.

Author: Elizabeth Baigent
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350203483
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Geographers is an annual collection of studies on individuals who have made major contributions to the development of geography and geographical thought. Volume 39 celebrates the contribution of Hugh Clout to the discipline. The thirty-ninth volume of Geographers Biobibliographical Studies adds significantly to the corpus of scholarship on geography's multiple histories and biographies; each chapter includes a select biography of its chosen figure, and a brief chronology of their work. In this edition Hugh Clout memorialises the forgotten, those who had made an important local contribution which went unnoticed on the national stage, or those who continued along the intellectual path blazed by one of the discipline's major figures and thus helped to secure the reputation of that major figure. In this collection of essays, Clout draws from used literary works, reviews in the scholarly and other press, obituaries in newspapers and geographical publications, funeral orations and papers in a large number of archives. Each study includes a select bibliography and a brief chronology. The work includes a general index, and a cumulative index of geographers listed in volumes published to date. As with other volumes in the series, the purpose is not to evaluate, but to present individuals and their contributions as they really were and in the context of their time. Published under the auspices of the International Geographical Union.

Author: Dorothee Hemme
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 382589892X
Category : Cultural property
Languages : de
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Die kulturellen Praktiken der Heritage-ifizierung - der Herausbildung und Nutzung von kulturellem Erbe - sind es, die in diesem Band in ethnographischer und historischer Perspektive einer Bestandsaufnahme unterzogen werden. Ein interdisziplinäres Autorenfeld untersucht Fallbeispiele vom Baltikum bis nach Südmexiko und durchleuchtet die spätmoderne Konjunktur des kulturellen Erbes auf ihre historische Genese und gegenwärtige Ausprägung. Die Beiträge erkunden die Rolle der Wissenschaften in der Produktion von kulturellem Erbe und fragen nach analytischen Zugangsweisen an das Thema heritage.

Author: Paul M. Dover
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000892875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This collection brings together fifteen essays from practitioners of a variety of disciplines that concern themselves with the past, not only historians, but scholars from other branches of the humanities and social sciences (including theology, art history, public history, and archival science) and natural sciences (including geology, paleontology, astronomy, and paleoanthropology). What is the relationship between the past and the present? This essential and seemingly straightforward question, of central importance to many fields of study, in fact yields a variety of answers, with significant repercussions for methodology, epistemology, and pedagogy. This volume’s contributors describe how they relate phenomena in the past and their observations of the present, revealing intellectual resonances and opportunities for dialogue across subjects that are too often walled off from one another. By engaging scholars in a conversation about a first principle of their work, this book offers a genuinely interdisciplinary consideration of a timeless question, with implications for knowledge about both past and present. Engaging with the Past and Present is full of insights and ideas for anyone seeking to understand the past or employ it as evidence for understanding present realities.

Author: Marco D'Eramo
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788731077
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A spirited critique of the cultural politics of the tourist age. Or, why we are all tourists who hate tourists We've all been tourists at some point in our lives. How is it we look so condescendingly at people taking selfies in front of the Tower of Pisa? Is there really much to distinguish the package holiday from hipster city-breaks to Berlin or Brooklyn? Why do we engage our free time in an activity we profess to despise? The World in a Selfie dissects a global cultural phenomenon. For Marco D'Eramo, tourism is not just the most important industry of the century, generating huge waves of people and capital, calling forth a dedicated infrastructure, and upsetting and repurposing the architecture and topography of our cities. It also encapsulates the problem of modernity: the search for authenticity in a world of ersatz pleasures. D'Eramo retraces the grand tours of the first globetrotters - from Francis Bacon and Samuel Johnson to Arthur de Gobineau and Mark Twain - before assessing the cultural meaning of the beach holiday and the 'UNESCO-cide' of major heritage sites. The tourist selfie will never look the same again.

Author: Beth S. Wenger
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400834058
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Most American Jews today will probably tell you that Judaism is inherently democratic and that Jewish and American cultures share the same core beliefs and values. But in fact, Jewish tradition and American culture did not converge seamlessly. Rather, it was American Jews themselves who consciously created this idea of an American Jewish heritage and cemented it in the popular imagination during the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. History Lessons is the first book to examine how Jews in the United States collectively wove themselves into the narratives of the nation, and came to view the American Jewish experience as a unique chapter in Jewish history. Beth Wenger shows how American Jews celebrated civic holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July in synagogues and Jewish community organizations, and how they sought to commemorate Jewish cultural contributions and patriotism, often tracing their roots to the nation's founding. She looks at Jewish children's literature used to teach lessons about American Jewish heritage and values, which portrayed--and sometimes embellished--the accomplishments of heroic figures in American Jewish history. Wenger also traces how Jews often disagreed about how properly to represent these figures, focusing on the struggle over the legacy of the Jewish Revolutionary hero Haym Salomon. History Lessons demonstrates how American Jews fashioned a collective heritage that fused their Jewish past with their American present and future.

Author: Geraldine Frieslaar
Publisher: African Sun Media
ISBN: 1991260415
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Although there have been significant strides to transform the demographics of archive and museum personnel, develop new museums and heritage institutions and heritage training initiatives in post-apartheid South Africa, the Eurocentric model of the archive, museum and heritage sector has largely remained intact. Despite the euphoria around the transformation of heritage in the beginnings of post-apartheid South Africa, it can be argued that the transformation of heritage institutions has been superficial and cosmetic with the ideological foundation of the colonial archive and museum, as well as Eurocentric modalities of heritage education remaining solid, largely unmoved, and under continuing challenge. This is the thrust of this book which reflects on the transformation of archives, and museum and heritage education in South Africa and argues for meaningful transformation of the sector through a decolonisation from its Eurocentric mooring.

Author: Neil McCaw
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441156623
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Adapting Detective Fiction is a study of specific instances of adaptation, with close readings of both the originating sources and adapted texts. But it is also more than this. It is a study of the politics of representation in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the role television detective fiction plays in this. It is about the mutually-informing interrelation of cultural texts and political rhetoric, about the connection between the popular-cultural depiction of crime and criminality and how we come to understand human behaviour and culpability; most of all, it is a detailed consideration of what the process of adaptation reveals about the shifting nature of the world in which we live. With specific reference to television series such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost, Cadfael, and Midsomer Murders, Adapting Detective Fiction uses adaptation as the basis for an exercise in later twentieth-century cultural history, illustrating the fundamental role detective fictions play in popular beliefs about the nature of crime and Englishness.