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
Preface to the Paperback Edition
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
To pen a new preface for a book less than two years old is a privilege granted few authors. Yet it is symptomatic of my topic that even this brief lapse of time commends a new look at how we engage with the past—or rather our manifold pasts. For each person, each group, each nation has its own views, views traditionally rooted yet also in ceaseless flux, of its particular past and, by extension, of history in general.
It is fitting that this paperback edition is issued by Cambridge University Press, which thirteen years ago published my forerunner. Having The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History under the same publishing roof as The Past is a Foreign Country prompts me to stress today's craving to domesticate that past: face to face with the past's foreignness, we are apt to wonder how we and our world could ever have come from so strange a place. My earlier book traced how historians had jettisoned assumptions that human nature was everywhere and always the same; comparative scrutiny showed that denizens of other times thought and acted in ways and for reasons unlike our own. But this insight is not shared by most cultures, nor widely accepted even in the West. We mainly idealize or demonize the past not as a foreign country, but as close kin to our own present-day homeland.
Three conjoined aims led me to write The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History , pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998