The Past Is a Foreign Country – Revisited

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

David Lowenthal (Author)

9780521616850, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 1 October 2015

676 pages, 108 b/w illus.
24.7 x 17.4 x 2.9 cm, 1.32 kg

'Jaw-dropping interdisciplinarity and dazzling intellectual playfulness.' Simon Ditchfield, York University

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.

Introduction
Part I. Wanting the Past: 1. Nostalgia: dreams and nightmares
2. Time travelling
3. Benefits and burdens of the past
Part II. Disputing the Past: 4. Ancients vs moderns: tradition and innovation
5. The look of age: aversion
6. The look of age: affection
Part III. Knowing the Past: 7. Memory
8. History
9. Relics
Part IV. Remaking the Past: 10. Saving the past: preservation and replication
11. Replacing the past: restoration and re-enactment
12. Improving the past
Epilogue: the past in the present.

Subject Areas: Geography [RG], General & world history [HBG], History: theory & methods [HBA]