Memory Heritage And Preservation In 20th Century England

This book explores commemoration practices and preservation efforts in modern Britain, focusing on the years from the end of the First World War until the mid-1960s. The changes wrought by war led Britain to reconsider major historical episodes that made up its national narrative. Part of this process was a reassessment of heritage sites, because such places carry socio-political meaning as do the memorials that mark them. This book engages the four-way intersection of commemoration, preservation, tourism, and urban planning at some of the most notable historic locations in England. The various actors in this process--from the national government and regional councils to private organizations and interested individuals--did nothing less than engineer British national memory. The author presents case studies of six famous British places, namely battlefields (Hastings and Bosworth), political sites (Runnymede and Peterloo), and world's fairgrounds (the Crystal Palace and Great White City). In all three genres of heritage sites, one location developed through commemorations and tourism, while the other 'anti-sites' simultaneously faltered as they were neither memorialized nor visited by the masses. Ultimately, the book concludes that the modern social and political environment resulted in the revival, creation, or erasure of heritage sites in the service of promoting British national identity. A valuable read for British historians as well as scholars of memory, public history, and cultural studies, the book argues that heritage emerged as a discursive arena in which British identity was renegotiated through times of transitions, both into a democratic age and an era of geopolitical decline. David Strittmatter is an Assistant Professor of History at Ohio Northern University (ONU), in the USA. His research in memory studies has particular emphases on tourism and commemoration. In addition, he oversees public history and museum studies initiatives at ONU. He earned his doctorate at the University of Buffalo (SUNY) and prior degrees at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

This book explores commemoration practices and preservation efforts in modern Britain, focusing on the years from the end of the First World War until the mid-1960s. The changes wrought by war led Britain to reconsider major historical episodes that made up its national narrative. Part of this process was a reassessment of heritage sites, because such places carry socio-political meaning as do the memorials that mark them. This book engages the four-way intersection of commemoration, preservation, tourism, and urban planning at some of the most notable historic locations in England. The various actors in this process—from the national government and regional councils to private organizations and interested individuals—did nothing less than engineer British national memory. The author presents case studies of six famous British places, namely battlefields (Hastings and Bosworth), political sites (Runnymede and Peterloo), and world’s fairgrounds (the Crystal Palace and Great White City). In all three genres of heritage sites, one location developed through commemorations and tourism, while the other ‘anti-sites’ simultaneously faltered as they were neither memorialized nor visited by the masses. Ultimately, the book concludes that the modern social and political environment resulted in the revival, creation, or erasure of heritage sites in the service of promoting British national identity. A valuable read for British historians as well as scholars of memory, public history, and cultural studies, the book argues that heritage emerged as a discursive arena in which British identity was renegotiated through times of transitions, both into a democratic age and an era of geopolitical decline.

In The City as Subject, Carolyn S. Loeb examines distinctive bodies of public art in Berlin: legal and illegal murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, post-reunification public sculptures, and images and sites from the street art scene. Her careful analyses show how these developed new architectural and spatial vocabularies that drew on the city's infrastructure and daily urban experience. These works challenged mainstream urban development practices and engaged with citizen activism and with a wider civic discourse about what a city can be. Loeb extends this urban focus to her examination of the extensive outdoor installation of the Berlin Wall Memorial and its mandate to represent the history of the city's division. She studies its surrounding neighborhoods to show that, while the Memorial adopts many of the urban-oriented vocabularies established by the earlier works of public art she examines, it truncates the story of urban division, which stretches beyond the Wall's existence. Loeb suggests that, by embracing more multi-vocal perspectives, the Memorial could encourage the kind of participatory and heterogeneous construction of the city championed by the earlier works of public art.

Where does our fascination for 'heritage' originate? This groundbreaking comparative study of preservation in France, Germany and England looks beyond national borders to reveal how the idea of heritage emerged from intense competition and collaboration in a global context. Astrid Swenson follows the 'heritage-makers' from the French Revolution to the First World War, revealing the importance of global networks driving developments in each country. Drawing on documentary, literary and visual sources, the book connects high politics and daily life and uncovers how, through travel, correspondence, world fairs and international congresses, the preservationists exchanged ideas, helped each other campaign and dreamed of establishing international institutions for the protection of heritage. Yet, these heritage-makers were also animated by fierce rivalry as international tension grew. This mixture of international collaboration and competition created the European culture of heritage, which defined preservation as integral to modernity, and still shapes current institutions and debates.

A wide-ranging study that examines the tendency in 20th-century English fiction to treat grief as an occasion for social critique, unconventional readings of works by Ford, Lessing, and Winterson demonstrate how narrative experimentation in this period responds to socio-historic conditions like post-imperial melancholy, nuclear fear and homophobia.

Who decides which stories about a city are remembered? How do interpretations of the past shape a city’s present and future? In this book, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos discusses notions of power and national identity by examining how nation-states negotiate the preservation of urban spaces and how a city interprets, resists, and consents to the functions and meanings that it has inherited and that it reinvents for itself. Looking at the Brazilian city of Ouro Preto, de Souza Santos applies fine-grained ethnography and historical analysis to discuss the limits of Brazil’s imagery of social harmony and participatory democracy amid continuous inequality.

When Theatres of Memory was first published in 1994, it transformed the debate about what is to be considered history and questioned the role of "heritage" that lies at the heart of every Western nation's obsession with the past. Today, in the age of Downton Abbey and Mad Men, we are once again conjuring historical fictions to make sense of our everyday lives. In this remarkable book, Samuel looks at the many different ways we use the 'unofficial knowledge' of the past. Considering such varied areas as the fashion for "retrofitting," the rise of family history, the joys of collecting old photographs, the allure of reenactment societies and televised adaptations of Dickens, Samuel transforms our understanding of the uses of history. He shows us that history is a living practice, something constantly being reassessed in the world around us.