The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History

Product Description
Heritage, while it often constitutes and defines the most positive aspects of culture, is a malleable body of historical text subject to interpretation and easily twisted into myth. When it is appealed to on a national or ethnic level in reactions against racial, religious, or economic oppression, the result is often highly-charged political contention or conflict. The extraordinary theme of this unique book is how the rise of a manifold, crusade-like obsession with tradition and inheritance--both physical and cultural--can lead to either good or evil. In a balanced account of the pros and cons of the rhetoric and spoils of heritage--on the one hand cultural identity and unity, on the other, potential holy war--David Lowenthal discusses the myriad uses and abuses of historical appropriation and offers a rare and accessible account of a concept at once familiar and fraught with complexity. David Lowenthal is Emeritus Professor of Geography at University College London, and the author of the bestselling The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985)
Review
"Brave, piquant and impressively broad-ranging." Linda Colley, Times Literary Supplement

"Must reading for public historians." James M. Lindgren, The Public Historian

"The Heritage Crusade and The Past Is a Foreign Country together provide the intellectual underpinning and wider context that any understanding of preservation as meaning and direction requires." Robert Wilson, Preservation (US National Trust)

"...[Lowenthal] is an alert and indefatigable snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. Cheerfully jaundiced, exuberantly glum, he shuffles a kaleidoscope of quotation and comment on every aspect of the heritage phenomenon: books, magazines, newspapers, jokes, anecdotes, and personal experience." Richard Jenkyns, New York Review of Books

"...a major literary achievement....Eschewing model-building for the well-chosen example and literature for social science, Lowenthal has crafted a book that will excite readers of the New York Review of Books as well as those of the Annals...Geographers, no less than historians, ignore it at their peril." Steven Hoelscher, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1997

"Timely and provocative...brilliant and stimulating pyrotechnic...everything from the Pilgrim Fathers to the Inuits, from Homer's Greece to the rainforests of Brazil...Such an all-embracing approach is commendable and reveals a polymathic mind." Roy Strong, The Sunday Times

"David Lowenthal knows more about the uses and abuses of the past than anyone I know of...The book is filled with fascinating examples of claims and counterclaims made in the name of heritage...There is much in Lowenthal's account that is entertaining, even downright comical. But the author's message is deeply serious, for he warns us that a faith in heritage can produce murderous fanaticism." John R. Gillis, Reviews in American History

"The best book I have read on historic preservation, by the way, is The heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, by David Lowenthal..." WoodenBoat

"The many writings of David Lowenthal have been helpful to those anxious to sort out the legitimate from the spurious in the twentieth century western preoccupations with organized history and heritage...In publishing ^The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Mr. Lowenthal has taken us further down this road and on this excursion he takes time to guide us along several interesting and unexpected detours." Manitoba History, Graham MacDonald, Calgary, Alberta
Book Description
Heritage has burgeoned over the past quarter of a century from a small élite preoccupation into a major popular crusade. Everything from Disneyland to the Holocaust Museum, from the Balkan wars to the Northern Irish Troubles, from Elvis memorabilia to the Elgin Marbles bears the marks of the cult of heritage. In this acclaimed book David Lowenthal explains the rise of this new obsession w