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  1. Home
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  3. The Past Is a Foreign Country – Revisited
  • Cited by 316
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
November 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781139024884
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139024884
Subjects:
Regional and World History: General Interest, History
Information

Book description

The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.

Awards

Winner, 2016 British Academy Medal

Reviews

'Dazzling and wide-ranging … packed with vivid examples and a vast range of pithy quotations, and throughout expressed with verve and wit.'

Robert Tombs Source: Evening Standard

'The range is truly impressive and the understanding, indeed vision, at play in the presentation of past legacies makes for an enthralling read.'

Source: Standpoint

'In giving a context to conservation work of any type, in providing insights into the ways the past is seen, has been seen, and how the past is analysed (and why), this book is invaluable. … This is a superb survey. Covering almost the whole field of what we as a species have made, good and bad, and how we deal with this making and its outputs (or indeed how we do not deal with them), this is a book of great range and richness and offers an intensely personal view that always informs and challenges. Lowenthal’s sheer energy, his depth of coverage and his insights are accessible, fascinating and essential reading.'

Graham Voce Source: News in Conversation: International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works

'Reader-friendly, with a light touch and a sharp sense of irony and paradox. Moves with ease from the psychology of memory to school textbooks,  science fiction, museums, forgeries, re-enactments, ephemera, apologies for actions taken long ago, the effects of ageing (on both artefacts and people), and, of course, heritage.'

Peter Burke Source: History Today

'A work of extraordinary breadth and depth by a scholar of stupendous erudition … essential reading for anyone interested in geography, history, and the nature of the human condition.'

Alexander B. Murphy Source: AAG Review of Books

'Magnificent book, indisputably a modern classic. Extraordinarily rich and endlessly fascinating meditation on the uses and abuses of the past in modern western culture … brilliant scholarship, sublimely elegant prose.'

Michael Heffernan Source: AAG Review of Books

'Of inestimable value to encounter and understand the world … Unrivalled scholarship, drawn from a lifetime of collecting and reflecting, upon a dizzying diversity of texts, comments and experiences of the past in the present … a great read.'

David C. Harvey Source: AAG Review of Books

'Master chronicler of our complexly shifting engagements with the past.'

Dydia DeLyser Source: AAG Review of Books

'An exemplary philosophical and historical guide on the increased importance of the Past … Evocative writing endowed with rigor, freshness and humor. Extraordinary power of synthesis, admirable wisdom and amazing lightness.'

Luca Muscara Source: Revista Geográfica

'Surely ranks among the best of the best.'

Bruce Ryan - University of Cincinnati

'A stunning work of scholarship, a staggering tour de force.'

Stephen F. Brown - University of Ulster

'Jaw-dropping interdisciplinarity and dazzling intellectual playfulness.'

Simon Ditchfield - York University

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