Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the Paperback Edition
- Introduction
- 1 HERITAGE ASCENDENT
- 2 PERSONAL LEGACIES
- 3 COLLECTIVE LEGACIES
- 4 HERITAGE ASSAILED
- 5 THE PURPOSE AND PRACTICE OF HISTORY
- 6 THE PURPOSE OF HERITAGE
- 7 THE PRACTICE OF HERITAGE
- 8 BEING FIRST
- 9 BEING INNATE
- 10 RIVALRY AND RESTITUTION
- References
- Select Bibliography and Citation Index
- Acknowledgments
- Index
3 - COLLECTIVE LEGACIES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the Paperback Edition
- Introduction
- 1 HERITAGE ASCENDENT
- 2 PERSONAL LEGACIES
- 3 COLLECTIVE LEGACIES
- 4 HERITAGE ASSAILED
- 5 THE PURPOSE AND PRACTICE OF HISTORY
- 6 THE PURPOSE OF HERITAGE
- 7 THE PRACTICE OF HERITAGE
- 8 BEING FIRST
- 9 BEING INNATE
- 10 RIVALRY AND RESTITUTION
- References
- Select Bibliography and Citation Index
- Acknowledgments
- Index
Summary
At first yours or mine, heritage soon becomes inherently collective. We share what we inherit among colleagues and communities, nations and faiths. Rooted in many allegiances, we may simultaneously be carpenters, communists, Catholics, and Croatians. We are shaped by a congeries of disparate but overlapping legacies; allegiance compels painful choices. Personal bequests conflict with collective patrimonies also at odds. How important is being Pennsylvania Dutch or Navaho, asks a historian, relative to being “also an American, a molecular biologist, a woman, and a Baptist?” Each attachment, whether fixed at birth or freely chosen, presumes our fealty.
Choices among personal and collective legacies vary with culture and stage of life. Rebel youth and rugged individuals stress being self-made, owing nothing to family, society, or tradition. Democracy let Americans forget their ancestors and “imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands,” Tocqueville observed. Echoing Benjamin Franklin's pride in having “never inherited a shilling from any ancestor or relative,” 19th-century Americans boasted of being the architects of their own fortunes, of making it on their own without patronage or family influence. Emerson's “imperial self” discarded filiations of memory and custom; the American was a new Adam “emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race,” in R. W. B. Lewis's words, “an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling.”
Collective roots in America ever fray in the face of private interests. Few common lands or communal rights outlasted colonial regimes; corporate concerns yield to personal ones.
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- The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History , pp. 55 - 87Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998