Cambridge University Press eBooks· 2015
The Past is a Foreign Country – Revisited
- 544citations
- 2015year
Short summary
David Lowenthal revisits how contemporary society engages with the past, noting a shift from expert-certified narratives to a fragmented, contested history shaped by collective experience and sensory engagement.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Contemporary engagement with the past is increasingly sensory and experiential, moving beyond traditional textual analysis.
- Nostalgia and heritage have become pervasive forces in public and popular culture.
- The once expert-certified, unified view of history has fragmented into a contested, collectively forged narrative.
- New insights into memory, bias, identity, and authenticity are reshaping our understanding of historical inheritance.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
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.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2015 · DOI ↗
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Field: Archeology (Arts and Humanities)
ArcheologyArts and Humanities