Many thousands of historical pageants were held in twentieth-century Britain. These musical-dramatic re-enactments of history were especially popular in the interwar period, and in the 1930s Ralph Vaughan Williams collaborated with the novelist E. M. Forster to create two such pageants: The Abinger Pageant (1934) and England’s Pleasant Land (1938). Drawing on a range of published and archival sources, this chapter challenges readings of these and other pageants as expressions of a reactionary and conservative artistic (anti-) modernism. It sets them in the context of Vaughan Williams’s involvement with the Folk Revival, and his conception of folk culture as of vital relevance to contemporary society and its problems. It argues that these amateur performances of local history should be seen as realizations of Vaughan Williams’s ideals for a national culture which rested on the revival of local communities through art that was made by those selfsame communities. Vaughan Williams’s historical pageants were consistent with his left-leaning reading of English history, and with his belief in the radical potential of art – and specifically art that drew on an autochthonous vernacular musical tradition – to enrich human experience in the here and now, and on into the future.

The term “identity” often generates questions about the “essence” of the entity being “identified.” Ascriptions of “identity” become controversial inasmuch as given behaviors or traits are viewed as favorable or unfavorable. Within the United States, the rhetorical trope “this is not who we are” has become almost pervasive upon the occurrence of a regrettable, even heinous, act. President Obama had a particular affinity for the phrase. He suggested, for example, that the vicious racism revealed in the 2015 massacre of African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina was aberrant, revealing nothing essential about American culture. The current debate within the United States about the “1619 Project” is all about constitutional and cultural identity. Its adherents argue that American identity is rooted in the white supremacy instantiated in the practice of slavery, dating back to 1619. Opponents emphasize the 1776 Declaration of Independence, with its proclamation that “all men are created equal” and “endowed” with equal “inalienable rights,” as the key marker of American identity. Slavery, which is conceded to have existed, was simply epiphenomenal; “who we are” is defined by the Declaration. Much is thought to ride on ascribing a particular identity to any given country or, more particularly, its constitution.

This chapter focuses on the everyday. It considers how responsibility for the everyday, quotidian care of cultural heritage is assumed or allocated and the form that this takes. It analyses how care is translated into access, preservation and care of collections and places and how risk is managed when access has the potential to harm the long-term future of cultural heritage. This chapter analyses the ways in which access and preservation are supported, through financial support as well as in statutory provisions; it analyses the duties of care placed on custodians of cultural heritage and the role played by standard-setting.

Collecting and collector culture remain important aspects in the contemporary graphic novel, sustaining a relationship to the past that is tangible in material objects. While the representation of collectors is well known, this chapter charts a somewhat different aspect of collectors and the archives they assemble: it is less interested in graphic novelists as collectors than in their indebtedness to previous collections and the new uses they invent for them. This chapter attends to an earlier moment in the history of comics, one that precisely framed collecting as part of a media-historical conversation and in a context of changing ideas about cultural value, preservation, reproduction, and access, studying its long-term implications for understanding the archival impulse in the graphic novel today.

Sandstones of aeolian origin have been identified from many periods of Earth’s history. They provide a record of the extent of ancient desert conditions and associated (paleo-) wind regimes. The creation of an aeolian stratigraphic record involves construction and accumulation of a sand sea or dune field and its preservation through subsidence, a rise in the regional water table, or burial. Comparisons between the environments of ancient aeolian sandstones and modern sand seas indicate that few are likely to be preserved in the rock record.

The goal of the final chapter is to examine the central role of necessities in the epistemological, moral and political theory of An Essay of Human Understanding and of the Two Treatises of Government. A study of the former shows Locke’s preoccupation with classical moral questions such as happiness and the ‘good objects of desires’ and how necessities helped him to strike a balance between tradition and the new science. As a rule of thumb of proper conduct, knowledge of necessities leads to the preservation of life, a human being’s most important duty to God. His doctrine of necessities is what made it possible for Locke to develop the theory of the public good with which, it is argued, he attempted to defeat the egoist theory of self-interest. Examination of his conception of property and money through the lens of human necessities shows a certain ambiguity in Locke’s normative ideals. Nevertheless, my conclusion is that above other considerations underlying the capital-oriented ideals of the period, the last word of Locke’s political theory is the public good represented by preservation and convenience for the commonwealth and, when possible, for the whole of humanity.

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) is essential for transgender people’s reproductive justice and autonomy in relation to fertility preservation and family building, whether using their own bodies (eggs, sperm, or uterus), donor gametes, or a gestational carrier. The ability to form a family using one’s own gametes and/or body is necessary for transgender people to consider before medical transition is initiated (hormones/surgeries) and is part of the Informed Consent process of gender medical transition. Progressive thinking, greater cultural awareness and modern medicine have contributed to an increase in transgender people utilizing ART to create their families. Helping transgender patients navigate medically assisted fertility preservation and reproduction requires diverse knowledge, sensitivity training and cultural inclusivity for fertility counselors. Providing gender-affirmative care in reproductive endocrinology and fertility settings when working with transgender patients involves understanding terminology used in the transgender population, use of a trauma-informed care lens, knowledge of a nonbinary gender system, avoiding heteronormativity, cisnormativity and knowledge of gender dysphoria. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), The Endocrine Society, World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) have published documents addressing fertility and preservation considerations for transgender people.

This chapter examines careers in, and the structure of, central and federal government archaeology, especially centralized heritage management organizations operating nationally. The chapter includes examples of central cultural heritage management regimes from around the world.

This chapter examines careers in, and the structure of, local and state government archaeology, especially development control and regulatory roles based at the local and regional level. The chapter includes discussion of locally held and managed historic environment records, and of specialist and community roles, such as engagement with Indigenous communities.

Historic places are vulnerable to a wide variety of threats: neglect, lack of maintenance, demolition, war, and, of course, time itself. No physical or legal intervention will ever be able to make them last forever. Yet, laws can help make historic sites more resilient to the avoidable consequences of obvious threats. This chapter focuses on the legal framework in the United States for fortifying heritage against one particular threat: disasters resulting from natural hazards. Natural hazards include large-scale meteorological and geological events such as hurricanes, tropical storms, tornadoes, floods, blizzards, wildfires, earthquakes, extreme heat, and drought. Climate change has made many of these events more frequent and more intense. Given the increasing risks to historic sites, one might think that planning, mitigation, and recovery efforts are being undertaken with increased urgency. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Without adequate planning and protection, some of our cultural heritage has already been lost or will be lost imminently. This chapter begins by identifying and assessing current policies regarding the protection of historic resources before, during, and after a disaster. It highlights key elements for successful legal protection at each of these three stages. Then it describes our multi-governmental, federalist framework for heritage-related disaster policy. This policymaking takes place at the federal, state, and local levels, mostly through the legislative process and action by executive agencies. Each level of government plays overlapping roles in planning for, mitigating, and recovering from disaster. As the scale of government gets smaller, coordination among historic preservation authorities becomes either less effective or non-existent. This chapter covers each level of government in turn by first describing federal disaster planning and historic preservation requirements. Next, the chapter explores how two states and four local governments have integrated disaster mitigation and historic preservation considerations.

With the rise of digital technologies the number and diversity of related tools (such as phones, computers, 3-D printers, etc.) have markedly increased. This chapter examines how digital objects and other new technologies alter human experiences with the material world.

This chapter looks at the projects that the Elmhirsts instigated on their estate to promote agricultural and industrial revival and democratic participation. It positions Dartington amid the many interwar rural reform ventures with which it cross-pollinated, from the New Deal in America and Sriniketan in India to Rolf Gardiner’s Springhead and government smallholding schemes in Britain. Dorothy and Leonard’s philosophy of rural regeneration – attempting to combine ‘microscopic’ support for community life with the ‘macroscopic’ approach that was international in its outlook – prefigured and helped shape the phenomenon central to the later twentieth century. The sociologist Roland Robertson calls this ‘glocalisation’: a process by which local community is reconfigured, and even strengthened, by global forces. The gradual migration of the Elmhirsts’ vision of Dartington – from a self-governing, holistically integrated collective to an outpost of centralised social planning – dovetailed effectively into plans for national reconstruction during and after the Second World War.

This chapter argues that Swiftian irony functions in a way similar to the Whiggish model of political revolution: both function “to preserve and to reform,” and both create new commitments based on challenging, revising, and criticizing existing institutions. Swift’s satire functions first and foremost, of course, to highlight weaknesses, defects, and corruptions in its objects; but, in a gesture reminiscent of Burkean conservatism and Rorty’s irony, his parody also serves as a means of preserving while reforming the satirized object, coopting its genuinely admirable qualities and opening up new spaces for indulgence and play. Burke makes explicit a model of ironic politics implicit in Swift’s Tale: political institutions are contestable primarily because they are an ongoing, unfinished project. Each generation must recognize this limitation and adapt institutions to their own needs.

By telling the story of interwar environmental perspectives, the introduction wishes to navigate and explain different trends in the history of global environmental law and in studies on the League. Using these questions to track possible links between history, law, and environment, the book shall explore those opportunities in environmental law and international relations in which the League was so deeply involved. As the introduction will explain, this reclaiming of the past enables us to deepen the conventional analysis beyond what we would describe as “historiographic amnesia,” which is typically characteristic of research about the League, as exemplified by the paradigm of the Rise and Fall of the League of Nations. As such, the story of the League as a whole, with its different (and sometimes inconsistent) challenges – which up until now have been missing from both the history of international law and environmental history – serves as fresh territory for new, unique exploration. The introduction will show how the two different research fields – that of the interwar period, and that of the evolution of international environmental law – can be bridged together by revealing the exciting plot of the environmental regime of the League