Product Details

Choice

Glassberg uses a series of loosely related essays on small, sometimes seemingly insignificant, topics as a way of meditating on a large, complex, and important matter: the differences and interrelationships between the 'sense of history' among academic historians and the American people. Both public and academic historians ought to find this readable work thought-provoking and rewarding.

Publishers Weekly

How is the past used? Who writes our history and what political ends do they try to accomplish by advocating one version of the American past rather than another? These are old questions, and University of Massachusetts at Amherst historian Glassberg provides tedious and predictable answers. He devotes an entire chapter, for example, to persuading readers of the obvious that war memorials may tell us more about the eras in which they were built than the wars they commemorate. In another essay, he explains how rituals in America's industrialized cities, like San Francisco's 1909 Portol Festival, promoted the idea that the heterogeneous, polyglot immigrant populations of urban landscapes were one people. Glassberg also discusses Ken Burns's Civil War miniseries, noting that leading historians were dissatisfied with Burns's portrayal of African-Americans. The topic is interesting, but Glassberg's treatment adds little to Ken Burns's the Civil War: Historians Respond, edited by Robert Brent Toplin. Glassberg's discourse on New England towns is desultory and not obviously related to his overarching thesis about the construction of historical memory. Not that this is a book totally bereft of insight: in a prosaic chapter about the construction of historical meaning in California, Glassberg does make the fresh point that Californians, in their embrace of redwoods and sequoias, "named, labeled, and displayed" their trees "like historical relics." But the occasional thoughtful paragraph cannot rescue this book from its banality. (Apr.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

In seven essays composed and revised over the course of a decade, Glassberg (public history, U. of Massachusetts-Amherst) explores the various ways Americans have understood and used the past during the 20th century. For a population of rootless immigrants, he contends, the sites of great events or vanished lifestyles, become the most valuable and tangible manifestations of history. He points out how New England villages, Civil War battlefields in Virginia, and gold rush towns in California anchor personal and family identities. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

What People Are Saying

Glassberg is an enormously well read guide to the literature on public history and historical consciousness, and this volume brings together the fruits of his many years of reading and practice in the field.
—(Roy Rosenzweig, coauthor of The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life

What People Are Saying

David Glassberg has a very substantial scholarly reputation as one who has investigated and thoughtfully reflected on the meanings history has held for a broad range of people and communities in our society, over time. . . . This is a unique, engaging, and refreshing book, at once profound and modest—an important scholar's contribution to debates of considerable significance.
—(Michael H. Frisch, author of A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History)

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents