Imagining The Past

How we make history--and what we then make of it--is engagingly dramatized in T. H. Breen's portrait of a 350-year-old American community faced with the costs of its “progress.” In the particulars of one town's struggle to check development and save its natural environment, Breen shows how our sense of history reflects our ever-changing self-perceptions and hopes for the future. Breen first went to East Hampton, the celebrated Long Island resort town, to write about the Mulford Farmstead, a picturesque saltbox dating from the 1680s. Through his research, he came across a fascinating cast of local characters, past and present, who contributed to, invented, and reinvented the town's history. Breen's work also drew him into contemporary local affairs: factionalism among residents, zoning disputes, and debates over resource management. Driving these heated issues, Breen found, were some dearly held notions about a harmonious, agrarian past that conflicted with what he had come to know about the divisiveness and opportunism of East Hampton's early days. Imagining the Past is about the interplay between some of the East Hampton histories Breen encountered: the “official” histories of many generations, the myths and oral traditions, and the curious stories that Breen, as an outsider, discerned in the town's rich holdings of artifacts and documents. With a warm yet wry regard for human nature, Breen obliges us to confront our pasts in all their complexities and ironies, no matter how unsettling or inconvenient the experience.

This book takes a sociocultural, developmental and dialogical perspective to explore the constructive and interconnected nature of remembering and imagining. Conceived as cognitive-affective processes, both emerge at the border of the person and his or her socio-cultural world. Memory is approached as a functional adaption to the environment using the resources of the past in preparation for action in the present. Imagination is tightly related to memory in that both aim to escape the confines of the concrete here-and-now situation; however, while memory is primarily oriented to the past, imagination looks to the future. Both are embedded in the exchanges with the social and cultural milieu, and thus theorizing them has relied on key ideas from Lev Vygotsky, Frederic Bartlett and Mikhail Bakhtin. Thus, this book aims to integrate theories of remembering and imagining, through rich empirical studies in diverse cultural settings and concerning the development of self and identity. These two groups of studies compose the subparts that organize the book.

Brain research is opening up our understanding of not only what role the different areas of our brain play in making decisions or in recognizing the faces of those we love, but even in experiencing God. As a pastoral theologian and counselor, Hogue values and utilizes the significant resources of the brain sciences for the work of the church in guiding, healing, and challenging persons and systems informed by our current understanding of the central nervous system. His latest book, Remembering the Future, Imagining the Past, is an especially useful resource for all those persons concerned with the practical theological arts of preaching, worship, pastoral care, and counseling, as well as those interested in how our increasing knowledge of the ways in which our brains work can help us understand and tailor our spiritual and pastoral practices in the church.

This exquisite volume beautifully reproduces and insightfully examines the most important illuminations found in French history manuscripts.

The landscapes of human habitation are not just perceived; they are also imagined. What part, then, does imagining landscapes play in their perception? The contributors to this volume, drawn from a range of disciplines, argue that landscapes are 'imagined' in a sense more fundamental than their symbolic representation in words, images and other media. Less a means of conjuring up images of what is 'out there' than a way of living creatively in the world, imagination is immanent in perception itself, revealing the generative potential of a world that is not so much ready-made as continually on the brink of formation. Describing the ways landscapes are perpetually shaped by the engagements and practices of their inhabitants, this innovative volume develops a processual approach to both perception and imagination. But it also brings out the ways in which these processes, animated by the hopes and dreams of inhabitants, increasingly come into conflict with the strategies of external actors empowered to impose their own, ready-made designs upon the world. With a focus on the temporal and kinaesthetic dynamics of imagining, Imagining Landscapes foregrounds both time and movement in understanding how past, present and future are brought together in the creative, world-shaping endeavours of both inhabitants and scholars. The book will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and archaeologists, as well as to geographers, historians and philosophers with interests in landscape and environment, heritage and culture, creativity, perception and imagination.

The first comparative, cross-cultural study of medieval illustrated histories that engages in a direct, confrontational dialogue with Byzantine historical memory.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

In 911, the French king ceded land along the river Seine to Rollo the Viking, on condition that he convert to Christianity. This work advances our understanding of early Normandy and the Vikings' transformation from pagan raiders to Christian princes. It also sheds light on the intersection of religious tradition, identity, and power.