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 1998 book David Lowenthal explains the rise of this obsession with the past and examines its power for both good and evil.

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, r...

Shakespeare’s Thought: Unobserved Details and Unsuspected Depths in Eleven Plays demonstrates that Shakespeare’s plays were conceived and executed as studies of great moral and political issues. After examining the divergent views of critics across the years, this book goes on to analyze eleven of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, observing details and supplying interpretations that indicate the depth of his mind and the full extent of his artistic spirit. This book offers an in-depth explo...

Is unity of knowledge possible? Is it desirable? Two rival visions clash. One seeks a single way of explaining everything known and knowable about ourselves and the universe. The other champions diverse modes of understanding served by disparate kinds of evidence. Contrary views pit science against the arts and humanities. Scientists generally laud and seek convergence. Artists and humanists deplore amalgamation as a threat to humane values.These opposing perspectives flamed into h...

The idea that the heritage of nature is fundamentally cultural is provocative to many, but it is becoming increasingly accepted in the context of heritage preservation. It is argued here that a person’s perspective on natural vs. cultural heritage as a contested patrimony is, to some extent, governed by one’s intellectual and geographical position. In discourses influenced by the natural sciences culture is a heritage of nature, whereas in those deriving from the humanities and social scie...

First published in 1986, Landscape Meanings and Values presents a major contribution to the debate concerning the relationship between theory and practice in landscape analysis and planning. It brings together a number of the most eminent researchers, commentators and practitioners from both the United States of America and Britain to pursue the fundamental meanings and values in landscape. The insights into the theory behind landscape management will force a fundamental rethink o...

David Lowenthal transposes present society onto that in the novel, 1984, and illustrates “how the quest for a perfect society led instead to the worst––in the course of revolting against which the true ends of life are established.” It is more than suspicion: the year 2021 is 1984. What many understand by instinct, Lowenthal here articulates in clear terms using the political prophesy of this no longer futuristic literature. To be one without truthful unity? This is the picture of...

George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) was the first to reveal the menace of environmental misuse, to explain its causes, and to prescribe reforms. David Lowenthal here offers fresh insights, from new sources, into Marsh’s career and shows his relevance today, in a book which has its roots in but wholly supersedes Lowenthal’s earlier biography George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter (1958). Marsh’s devotion to the repair of nature, to the concerns of working people, to women’...

'History is written by the winners' is the received wisdom. This book explains why historical interpretation has to incorporate perspectives from those other than 'winners', and demonstrates archaeology's crucial role in this wide-ranging approach. The book draws more on Africa, Afro-America, Australasia and Oceania than on Europe, the source of the traditionally dominant perspective in archaeology. The four organizing themes of The Politics of the Past are the forms and consequen...

To Pass On a Good Earth is the candid and compelling new biography of one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive and influential scholars. The legendary "Great God beyond the Sierras," Carl Ortwin Sauer is America’s most famed geographer, an inspiration to both academics and poets, yet no book-length biography of him has existed until now.This Missouri-born son of German immigrants contributed to many fields, with a versatility rare in his time and virtually unknown t...

By analyzing many of Lincoln's most important speeches, The Mind and Art of Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman shows him to be a profound and systematic thinker who tries to get at the root of issues, not all of them strictly political. Lowenthal emphasizes Lincoln's manner of writing, which enables him to conceal his most radical thoughts, and pays special attention to the reasoning and artfulness with which he treats a wide variety of subjects. The book follows Lincoln from his Perpe...

The works of William Shakespeare vividly represent for our admiration and study a pageant of souls with longing in whose wake we ceaselessly follow. Through some of his most memorable characters, Shakespeare illuminates the nature and character—as well as consequences—of our distinctively human passions and ambition, in particular our desire for and pursuit of both honor and love. The contributors to this collaborative volume (scholars in English Literature, Political Philosophy, and the H...