The Past Made Present

David Lowenthal

Historically Speaking, Volume 13, Number 4, September 2012, pp.2-6 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/hsp.2012.0040

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wo opposing attitudes dominate recentdiscourse on the use and misuse of his-tory. Many take refuge in the past as an

antidote to present disappointments and futurefears. They hark back nostalgically or formulaicallyto the fancied benefits, even to the fearsome bur-dens, of times of lost purity and simplicity, lapsedimmediacy and certitude,in some Golden Age ofclassical serenity, Christianfaith, pastoral plenitude,or childhood innocence.Sojourning in the pastseems preferable to livingin the present.

And given themounting surfeit of her-itage sites and structures,more and more of thepast is accessible. Criticsfind the collective legacycrushingly voluminous,backward looking, and crippling to present enter-prise. Fifty years ago architectural historian ReynerBanham condemned “the load of obsolete build-ings that Europe is humping along on its shoulders[as] a bigger drag on the live culture of our conti-nent than obsolete nationalisms or obsolete moralcodes.”1 The load is now heavier. In much of Eng-land one feels hardly ever out of sight of a listedbuilding, a protected archaeological site, a museum-worthy work of art. The treasured past is said tooverwhelm French culture and politics. “Everythingis indiscriminately conserved and archived,” notes ahistorian of the patrimony.2 “We no longer makehistory,” charges Jean Baudrillard. “We protect it likean endangered masterpiece.”3 The Dutch architectRem Koolhaas calls preservation a dangerous epi-demic. Noting that UNESCO and similar bodies se-quester one-sixth of the Earth’s surface, with moreto come, he terms heritage a metastasizing cancer.4

The popular alternative to wallowing in thepast is to dismiss it entirely. The past has ever-di-minishing salience for lives driven by today’s fever-ish demands and delights. The sensory-ladenpenchant for computer gaming, coupled with atten-tion-deficit hyperactivity disorder, betoken a here-and-now environment dominated by raw sensations,in which “we live perpetually in the present.”5 Beingup-to-date now not only matters most, it is all thatmatters; knowing or understanding the past is animpediment in the present rat race.

Thus, for some, the past becomes the only

worthwhile time, while for others it seems of littleif any account. Yet these two takes, which seem ut-terly at odds, reflect the same overriding tendencyto fold past within present. Both nostalgists and am-nesiacs smudge the line between then and now.Whether all-consuming or overlooked, betokeningeverything or nothing, the past is less and less dis-

tinguishable from thepresent.

For the general pub-lic, to be sure, the pastwas never a foreign coun-try. Significantly, the 1971film script of L.P. Hart-ley’s The Go-Between omitshis second sentence, “theydid things differentlythere,” and shuns its im-plications.6 The cinematicpast is not foreign or dif-ferent. History vanishes;change is only life-cycle

nostalgia. So, too, with most docudramas. Beyondtheir costumes, characters differ only in age andgender and status; the same motives and mentalitiesanimate medieval as modern folk, elemental pas-sions enacted on a timeless stage.

The past is ever more comprehensively domes-ticated. “Just as easy travel eroded the differencesbetween one country and another, and between oneworld and another,” say Douglas Adams’s time trav-elers, so we are now “eroding the differences be-tween one age and another. The past is now trulylike a foreign country. They do things exactly thesame there.”7 Fiction that mimics history withoutbeing historical—Michael Cunningham’s The Hours(1999), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), HariKunzru’s Gods without Men (2011)—“inserts the con-temporary reader into other locations and times,while leaving no doubt that its viewpoint is relent-lessly modern and speaks entirely of our extremepresent,” observes Douglas Coupland.8 In the Inter-net universe, past, present, and future coexist atonce.

Past and present are increasingly spoken ofalike in the present tense. A British broadcaster in-terviews an aging celebrity about his past. “So,you’re a young undergraduate uncertain about thedirection your life should take.”9 The false nownesspresages the extinction of the past tense. The pastitself becomes more and more like the ongoingpresent: messy, inchoate, and inconclusive. Whereasprevious purveyors of history sought to order andexplain, bringing coherence that made the past quiteunlike the present, recent historiography stressescomplexity and contradiction, disparate viewpoints,and inherent uncertainties, much like those that af-flict the ongoing present.

CONTENTS

The Past Made Present 2David Lowenthal

British Perspectives on the War of 1812

The War of 1812 in the Grand 7Sweep of Military HistoryJeremy Black

“Faithful History”: British 8Representations of the War of 1812Andrew D. Lambert

The Naval War of 1812: 11An Interview with Andrew LambertConducted by Donald A. Yerxa

From Light to White: The Place and 13 Race of Jesus in Antebellum AmericaEdward J. Blum and Paul Harvey

Freedom Betrayed: An Interview with 16George H. Nash about Herbert Hoover’s Magnum OpusConducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Along the Hindu Kush: 19Warren Hastings, the Raj, and the Northwest FrontierKenneth W. Harl

The Soviet Air Force in World War II

Out of the Blue: The Forgotten 23Story of the Soviet Air Force in World War IIVon Hardesty

Red Phoenix Rising: 25An Interview with Ilya Grinberg Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

In Search of the City on a Hill 30Richard M. Gamble

On Being a Historian: An Interview with 32James M. Banner, Jr.Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

September 2012 Vol. XIII No. 4

2

HISTORICALLY SPEAKING

Historically Speaking • September 2012

T

Cover image: A detail from an 1813 print of the HMS Shannon engaged with the American frigate USS Chesapeake.Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [re-production number, LC-USZC4-6294].

Past and present are in-creasingly spoken ofalike in the presenttense. . . . The false now-ness presages the extinc-tion of the past tense.

THE PAST MADE PRESENT*David Lowenthal

*This essay synopsizes my Epilogue of The Past Is a Foreign Country,2nd Edition, by David Lowenthal. Copyright © 2012 David Lowen-thal. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

Our precursors identified with a unitary an-tiquity whose vestiges became models for theirown creations. Our own more numerous and ex-otic pasts, prized as vestiges, are divested of theiconographic meanings they once embodied. Nowa foreign terrain with a booming tourist trade, thepast suffers the usual consequences of popularity.The more it is appreciated for its own sake, theless real or relevant it becomes. No longer reveredor feared, the past is swallowed up by the ever-ex-panding present. “We are flooded with disposablememoranda from us to ourselves,” the historianDaniel Boorstin put it,but “we are tragicallyinept at receiving mes-sages from our ances-tors.”10

For historians thepast grows ever moreforeign. But the publicat large cannot toleratean alien past and stren-uously domesticates it,imputing present-dayaims and deeds to peo-ple of earlier times,clothing previous folkin their own mentalgarb, praising them forechoing their own pre-cepts or damning themfor failing to conformto them. The foreignpast gets reduced to ex-otic sites of tourism or filmic period fantasy; thepast cherished at home becomes a haunt of chau-vinist heritage, nostalgic tribalism, and retro re-makes. In popular media and at historic sites andmuseums human nature remains constant, peopleunchanged from age to age. Legends of originand endurance, of victory or calamity, project thepresent back, the past forward. No longer a for-eign country, the past becomes our sanitized own.

And history is no longer the privileged modeof access to the past it used to be. Memory’s emo-tional immediacy dethrones history’s aloof sobri-ety. Today’s memory boom reflects populistefforts to reclaim the past as a resource for pres-ent identity politics. History’s sober distance is notonly boring, it challenges our possession of thepast, which memory enables us to control. Nolonger what elites and experts tell us it was, thepast becomes what Everyman chooses to acceptas true. Personal preference trumps objectiveknowledge—Doonesbury’s “MyFACTS, privatiz-ing the truth since 2003.”11 Once everyone was en-titled to their own opinion, but not their ownfacts. No longer. Facts matter not at all. “It’s notonly that I feel it to be true,” notes Stephen Col-bert, “but that I feel it to be true.”12 Long averseto egghead elites, Americans today “are no longerwilling to defer to professional historians,” wroteJohann Neem in this journal in 2011; “We are notcredible.”13

Fifty years ago “the past seemed to belong

only to those skilled to tell it,” recalls Greg Den-ing, a historian of Oceania. Now it “belongs toall those on whom it impinges.” Dening laudssuch history for being inclusive. “Each side canonly tell its history by also telling the other’s.”14

But few do so. Possession instead privileges one’sown view as the only valid one. Other viewpoints,especially those of bygone people whom deathand absence have silenced, are dismissed as mis-taken, barbarous, iniquitous. Emboldened by self-righteous solipsism, Everyman today constrainsthe past to his own image, denying its difference

or demanding its likeness to his prejudices. Thusis renewed the assumption long previously held,by the learned as well as the laity, that people ofall epochs are basically alike, human naturechangeless, past and present essentially the same.

A major consequence of thus folding pastinto present is an incapacity to conceive that by-gone people lived by other principles and view-points. William Pfaff terms “the inability orunwillingness of people in public affairs to con-sider the events of another period” in the contextof that epoch’s beliefs and prejudices a growingproblem in international relations.15 Many are un-aware that preceding generations judged things bystandards unlike their own. Modern egalitariansfind it incredible that slavery, genocide, and grossinequality, far from being evil aberrations, werehabitual practices, sanctioned by moral philoso-phers from Aristotle to Machiavelli and Mon-tesquieu.

Young Americans cannot imagine “any sub-stantial argument in favor of aristocracy ormonarchy, [those] inexplicable follies of the past,”concludes Allan Bloom in his famous The Closingof the American Mind.16 Daniel Gordon’s Stanfordhistory students felt aggrieved to have to discussthe values of kings, aristocrats, and other “inher-ently repulsive” antiquated beings.17 Student pre-sentism is not surprising, since publishers nowban gender terms and differences and require de-pictions of the past to replace women passengers

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on sailboats with women hoisting the sails andwomen nurses and secretaries with women doctorsand managers. McGraw-Hill’s textbook pretensethat the modern ideal of gender equality was cus-tomary in previous centuries perverts the past intoan idealized egalitarian future with “no hierarchy ofbetter or worse.”18

Young Europeans are equally blind to the oth-erness of the past, incapable of accepting its alter-ity. Not realizing that people five centuries agoviewed things differently, 15-year-old his-tory students “argue only from their mod-ern viewpoint of individualism, secularismand autonomy.” Unable to envision “pre-modern reality and morality, even in the-ory,” notes a German historian, they relysolely on human-rights philosophy “for anera before the invention of humanrights.”19 Nor are the young today’s only in-nocents astounded by wicked ancestralways. Of the transatlantic slave trade,British Prime Minister Tony Blair found it“hard to believe that what would now be acrime against humanity was legal at thetime.”20 Yet until recently many denouncednot slave but free labor, at the mercenarymercy of avaricious employers. So, too,with other aspects of the past. “We mislead ourreaders into believing that nothing has ever beendifferent from right now, [that] there’s nothing newunder the sun,” asserts a historical novelist. On thecontrary, “the sun never rises twice on the samehuman sentiments. . . . We must remember thatuntil the twentieth century the condescension ofthe upper class and the submissiveness of theworking class were considered normal and even ad-mirable.”21

A century ago Italian Futurists assailed the pastas an incubus stifling present enterprise. They con-signed the relics of antiquity—ancient monuments,museum collections, ancestral veneration—to theflames. In the wake of Futurism came Modernism,similarly dedicated to all that was new, eager to shedthe shackles of the burdensome past. Architectsand artists flaunted contempt for tradition by jetti-soning plaster casts of classical and Renaissancestructures and by eliminating history from students’training. Emulation was passé, innovation obliga-tory.

Today the past is again under assault. But thecause and the context are utterly different. UnlikeFuturists and Modernists, we do not reprobate thepast’s material and aesthetic achievements; quite tothe contrary, we cherish them. Instead, we condemnprecursors’ wicked misdeeds and immoral institu-tions. Our racist, sexist, elitist forebears are anath-ematized as cruel and avaricious hierarchs, andhypocrites to boot.22 For the likes of that apostle ofliberty Patrick Henry, who confessedly kept slavesowing to the “general inconvenience of living with-out them,”23 there seems no excuse. Other found-ing fathers who fall short of contemporary moralityare refashioned to reflect current pieties. Americanhistory textbooks portray slavery with sorrow andshame but without anger, for there is no one to be

angry at.Critics decry such cover-ups. “If we are inter-

ested in history more than enshrinement,” grum-bles a historical curator, “the apologies offered forslavery at [presidential] sites . . . suggest a shallowfaith in the greatness of these men.”24 But thesesites are shrines. It is their custodians’ function toregret slavery yet salvage their owners’ reputations,like the Alabaman who assured Jonathan Rabanthat her Civil War ancestor “did not believe in slav-

ery. He had a very few, only about sixteen or twenty,something like that.”25 Portraying forebears as reluc-tant and marginal accessories mitigates what isnewly unconscionable.

We lack the appreciation of temporal distancethat let abolitionist Wendell Phillips to say of Amer-ica’s founding fathers, “I love these men; I hatetheir work. I respect their memory; I reject theirdeeds. I trust their hearts; I distrust their heads.”26

Few today would join Harriet Beecher Stowe inpraising North Carolina Judge Thomas Ruffin’scontention that the law compelled him to exoneratea hirer’s brutality toward a slave; his harsh verdict inState v. Mann (1829) was inherent in “the curse ofslavery,” for “the duty of the magistrate” must pre-vail over “the feelings of the man.”27 Ruffin’s wordsleft Stowe “feeling at once deep respect for the manand horror for the system.”28

Stowe’s distinction between the man and thesystem now goes unrecognized; blindness to pastcomplexity mires us in cognitive dissonance. Un-aware that the Constitution’s authors anticipated itscontinual revision as essential, Americans now ven-erate it as a sacred timeless compact never to be al-tered, while simultaneously censuring the foundingfathers who wrote it as Dead White Male slaveowners. Similarly, in newly penitential Australia, “theWhite nation appears not to want to understand its[pioneer settler] forebears,” writes an anthropolo-gist. It is far easier to “disinherit them, than to tryto unravel the uncomfortable fact that it was mostlyreasonable and humane men and women who tookpart in the processes and policies that we now seeas repugnant.”29

In 1996 William Pfaff noted that “every fig-ure from the past is held accountable for not think-ing and acting as right-minded people do today.”30

Ancestor-bashing has since intensified. We preen

ourselves on being better than our forebears.“Sorry, folks, for the brutality of our morally infe-rior ancestors,” jests Russell Baker. “If it had beenus in charge, with our enlightened new-age sensi-tivity, instead of those immoral old-timers, it wouldnever have happened.”31

Shifting morality, as Wendell Phillips remarked,leaves our hearts at odds with our heads. “We are allconvinced that enslaving human beings is bad. Howshall we characterize the once universal teaching

that you acquire a slave baby lawfully byowning the baby’s mother? . . . Can anyonetoday contemplate the slave trader andslaveholder without a shudder of disgust?”asks jurist-theologian John Noonan. “Cananyone empathize with the bigot putting atorch to the stake where the condemnedheretic will be incinerated? Abstractly, wemay concede that the slave owner and thepersecutor thought that they acted justly. Inour bones we experience repugnance andeven righteous rage.”32

Some feel obliged to arraign the de-ceased. “Think not that morality is ambu-latory; that vices in one age are not vicesin another,” cautioned Restoration philoso-pher Thomas Browne.33 Lord Acton fa-

mously inveighed against historical apologists whoclaimed “we have no common code; our moral no-tions are always fluid; and you must consider thetimes, the class from which men sprang, the sur-rounding influences, the masters in their schools,the preachers in their pulpits, the movement theyobscurely obeyed, and so on, until . . . not a culpritis left for execution.” Acton approved the Frenchstatesman Albert de Broglie’s maxim, “Beware oftoo much explaining, lest we end by too much ex-cusing.” To be sure, Acton added, “opinions alter,manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the morallaw is written on the tablets of eternity. Impersonal,disinterested and just [historians should] look withremorse upon the past.”34 He faulted H.C. Lea’s His-tory of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1887) for de-nouncing persecution but absolving thepersecutors—“crime without a culprit, the un-avenged victim who perishes by no man’s fault, lawwithout responsibility, the virtuous agent of viciouscause.”35

Acton’s colleagues and subsequent historiansmostly dissented. “The men who conscientiouslythought heresy a crime may be accused of an intel-lectual mistake, not necessarily of a moral crime,”countered Bishop Mandell Creighton.36 Acton as-sumed “that absolute knowledge of right andwrong which enables us to pass final judgment onthe men of the past, secure that we make no mis-take when we measure them by our own moralyardstick,” said Lea in his American Historical As-sociation presidential address. “Every foregone agehas similarly flattered itself ’” with the same illusion.But “there is scarce a sin condemned in the Deca-logue [Ten Commandments] which has not been ormay not now be regarded rather as a virtue.”

We are unable to conceive of vicarious

Historically Speaking • September 20124

The antidote to presentist misjudg-ment is historical understanding.“The follies, the crimes, and the will-fulnesses that were unspeakable willnot be turned into virtues but at leastwill become humanly understand-able,” reasoned Herbert Butterfield.

punishment as justifiable, yet Hammurabi .. . slays the innocent son and lets the guiltyfather go scatheless. To us the idea of levi-rate marriage is abhorrent, but it has beenregarded as legally a duty by . . . the He-brew and the Hindu. . . . No character inmedieval history stands forth with greaterlustre than the good St. Louis of France,yet . . . he fostered the nascent Inqui-sition and . . . enrich[ed] his treasurywith the confiscations resulting fromthe burning of heretics. . . . Whoamong us would feel justified in . . .condemning the Hebrew or St. Louis?

The historian who “aspires to be a judge .. . should not try a case by a code unknownto the defendant.”37

Indeed, “elementary justice demandsthat he who is to be judged should have ahearing: the dead are powerless to defendthemselves,” concurs Noonan. “It maymake a historian swell with pride to . . . setdown Thomas More as a persecutor orAbraham Lincoln” as a racist. But “no fig-ure of the past will meet the standards ofthe present.” Should we condemn Augus-tine and Aquinas for defending slavery andreligious persecution? Adjudge Washington,Jefferson, and Madison evil because they ownedslaves? Rebuke Supreme Court icons Brandeis,Holmes, and Hughes for upholding racial segrega-tion in the schools in 1926? “If each generation isfree to measure its predecessors morally, using thecriteria now accepted, no one will escape condem-nation.”38 “As we would have our descendants judgeus, so we ought to judge our fathers,” wroteMacaulay. “We ought to place ourselves in their sit-uation, to put out of our minds, for a time, all thatknowledge which they could not have, and whichwe could not help having.”39

The antidote to presentist misjudgment is his-torical understanding. “The follies, the crimes, andthe willfulnesses that were unspeakable will not beturned into virtues but at least will become humanlyunderstandable,” reasoned Herbert Butterfield. It isno good to say: “We cannot enter imaginatively intothis particular case because Catherine de’ Mediciwas wicked beyond all imagination”; we should in-stead remedy our deficiency of imagination.40

It is one thing to deplore past injustice, quiteanother to blame its perpetrators for not living upto today’s ethical code. Noonan envisages a bimil-lennial “heavenly choir made up of former slavesand of slaveholders such as Popes Gregory theGreat, Pius V, Pius VII,” countless saints, Domini-can and Jesuit missionaries, and Augustinian andCarmelite nuns. “What pope could retroactively dis-qualify from this assembly those who had ownedhuman beings?” Following John Paul II’s profusecontrition for previous church misdeeds, Catholichistorians found “something repellent, as well asprofoundly unhistorical, about judging the past bythe standards and prejudices of another age.”41

“Can we really be fair to men of the past,

knowing what they could not know, and with ourminds prepossessed by a knowledge of the result?”asked a historian of Tudor England.42 Hindsightgives us knowledge that people of bygone timescould not have had. But at the same time it blindsus to their awareness of that past, for them thepresent. “We, the survivors, see everything fromabove, see everything at once, and still we do not

know how it was,” wrote W. G. Sebald of the car-nage of carpet-bombed German cities.x43

The past as depicted becomes more magiste-rial than the present, for hindsight clarifies yesterdayas it cannot clarify today. The consequences of thepast are at least partly worked out and revealed; theresults of present acts are yet to be seen. Unlikecurrent accounts, those that “history presents to us,both of men and of events, are generally com-plete,” wrote the prescient political philosopher Bol-ingbroke. We see men “at their whole length inhistory, . . . through a medium less partial . . . thanthat of [immediate] experience.”44

No past is ever entirely over and done with, ofcourse; whatever our present retrospective wisdom,new insights ever unfold. But any degree of hind-sight makes the past more definitively known thanthe present, as the Victorian writer ElizabethGaskell ironically observed:

In looking back to the last century, it ap-pears curious to see how little our ances-tors had the power of putting two thingstogether, and perceiving either the discordor the harmony thus produced. Is it be-cause we are farther off from those times,and have, consequently, a greater range ofvision? Will our descendants have a won-der about us, such as we have about the in-consistency of our forefathers, or asurprise about our blindness? . . . Such dis-crepancies ran through good men’s lives inthose days. It is well for us that we live atthe present time, when everybody is logi-cal and consistent.45

History clarifies, tidies, and elucidates. This is thepoint of Lewis Namier’s paradox that historians“imagine the past and remember the future”:46 Theyexplain what has happened through the lens of sub-sequent events, events that lay in that past’s future.

That the passage of time clarifies the past forus but not for those who lived in it often goes un-recognized. “Man proceeds in the fog. But when he

looks back to judge people of the past, hesees no fog on their path,” observed MilanKundera:

From his present, which was theirfaraway future, their path looksperfectly clear to him, good visibil-ity all the way. Looking back, hesees the path, he sees the peopleproceeding, he sees their mistakes,but not the fog . . . . Who is moreblind? Mayakovsky, who as hewrote his poem on Lenin did notknow where Leninism would lead?Or we, who judge him decadeslater and do not see the fog thatenveloped him?

As Kundera realized, “Mayakovsky’s blind-ness is part of the general human condi-tion. But for us not to see the fog on

Mayakovsky’s path is to forget what man is, forgetwhat we ourselves are.”47

We remain willy-nilly accountable, asserts a po-litical scientist, for the whole of our collective pasts.

The totality of our past . . . is intertwinedwith our identity in its entirety. An Ameri-can memory with Emerson but withoutslavery would scarcely be intelligible; a Ger-man memory with Goethe but without theNational Socialist years . . . is unthinkable.[The past] is something . . . into which weare “thrown” . . . a fact at once non-electiveand unalterable . . . . We think back to thatpast, commemorate it in public, atone forit, and, occasionally, try to forget it. . . .[But] it is with us always.48

The past’s “attendant injuries and injustices are . . .so woven into what we are as a political commu-nity that they work among us even if they are notalways at the forefront of our consciousness.”49 Thepast is an inescapable part of being. We must striveto live companionably with its totality, aware of andalert to its defects and shortcomings and malfunc-tions, as to its glories and virtues and improve-ments, history’s farces along with its tragedies.“There is no document of civilization,” Walter Ben-jamin reminds us, “which is not at the same time adocument of barbarism.”50 We need to embrace thevile along with the valiant, the evil with the emi-nent, the sordid and sad as well as the splendid. Forthe whole of the past is our legacy.

We do well to retain reminders of actions andagents formerly acclaimed but now reviled, as les-sons in the transience of fame, the fallibility of im-

September 2012 • Historically Speaking 5

Milan Kundera on French television, 1968.

mediate repute, and the risks of hasty hero worship.Pennsylvania State University has stored out ofsight the statue of its once-idolized football coachJoe Paterno, now shown to have connived at con-cealing child abuse, lest it remain a “recurringwound” to the victims and their families, “its loom-ing presence . . . trigger[ing] a visceral, incapacitat-ing memory.” But removing the Paterno statue letsthe university forget “its own culpability in its ruth-less pursuit of glory . . . . Memorial statues are notsimply comments on their subjects, but commentson their makers.” Better perhaps to have kept thestatue, adding to it a full account of the crimes, asa warning to those “who would turn a pastime intoa god and elect a mortal man as its avatar.”51 Betterstill, “put up another darkly alluring statue behindPaterno, whispering in his ear: Mephistopheles.”For Paterno “put his own reputation above the wel-fare of children. The saint in black cleats sold hissoul, and Satan leads the dance.”52

Embraced or rejected, lauded or lamented, re-membered or forgotten, the whole of the past is al-ways with us. No one has not “said things, or liveda life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to himthat he would gladly expunge it. And yet” oneachieves wisdom only by passing through “all thefatuous or unwholesome incarnations,” saysProust’s painter Elstir. “The picture of what wewere at an earlier stage may not be recognisable andcannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in laterlife. But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proofthat we have really lived.”53 We inherit a legacy noless essential for being often indecipherable or ob-noxious. To be is to have been, and to project ourmessy, malleable past into our unknown future.

David Lowenthal is emeritus professor of geographyand honorary research fellow at University CollegeLondon. He is a gold medalist of the Royal Geograph-ical, the Royal Scottish Geographical, and the Ameri-can Geographical Societies, and a Fellow of the RoyalAcademy. In 2010 he was awarded the Forbes LecturePrize by the International Institute of Conservation.Among his many books are George PerkinsMarsh, Prophet of Conservation (University ofWashington Press, 2000), and The Heritage Cru-sade and the Spoils of History (Viking, 1997).

1 Reyner Banham, “Embalmed City,” New Statesman, April 12,1963, 528–530.

2 Marc Guillaume, interview “La politique du patrimoine . . .vingt ans après,” Labyrinthe no. 7 (2000): 11–20.

3 “The Illusion of the End” (1992), in Baudrillard, Selected Writ-ings (Polity, 2001), 261.

4 Rem Koolhaas, “Cronocaos: An Exhibition by OMA,” May7–June 5, 2011; Nicolai Ouroussoff, “The Art of Preservationor Distortion?” International Herald Tribune, May 25, 2011,11–12. newmuseum.org.exhibitions/44.

5 Susan Greenfield, “Are Video Games Taking Away Our Iden-tities?” The Times, November 5, 2011, 30, quoting her You andMe: The Neuroscience of Identity (Notting Hill, 2011).

6 L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between [1953] (New York Review ofBooks, 2003), 17.

7 Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything (Del Rey,1995), 116.

8 Douglas Coupland, “Convergences,” New York Times Book Re-view, March 11, 2012, 1, 10.

9 Matthew Parris, “My Week: The Pictures That Tell a Thou-sand Political Woes,” The Times, January 12, 2012, 22. See SamTanenhaus, “History, Written in the Present Tense,” New YorkTimes, March 4, 2007, 14.

10 Daniel J. Boorstin, “America and the World Experience: TheEnlarged Contemporary,” (BBC Reith Lecture), The Listener,December 11, 1975: 787.

11 G.B. Trudeau cartoon, International Herald Tribune, February 8,2012.

12 Stephen Colbert interview by Nathan Raban, The Onion AVClub, January 16, 2006, http://www.avclub.com/content/node/44705.

13 Johann N. Neem, “Taking Historical Fundamentalism Seri-ously,” Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society(November 2011): 4.

14 Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures andSelf (PennPress, 2004), 13.

15 William Pfaff, “The Danger of Seeing the Past throughToday’s Prism,” International Herald Tribune, June 6, 1998.

16 Allan D. Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon &Schuster, 1987), 90.

17 Daniel Gordon, “Teaching Western History at Stanford,” inLloyd Kramer et al., Learning History in America (University ofMinnesota Press, 1994), 52.

18 Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups RestrictWhat Students Learn (Knopf, 2003), 38–44, 63, citing McGraw-Hill’s Reflecting Diversity: Multicultural Guidelines (1993), still inplace in 2012.

19 Andreas Körber, “Can Our Pupils Fit into the Shoes ofSomeone Else?” in Joke van der Leeuw–Roord, ed., The State ofHistory Education in Europe: Challenges and Implications . . . Survey(Körber-Stiftung, 1998), 136.

20 David Smith, “Blair, Britain’s Sorrow for Shame of SlaveTrade,” Observer, November 26, 2006, 1.

21 Edmund White, “The New Historical Novel,” in his Arts andLetters (Cleis, 2004), 25, 27.

22 David Lowenthal, “On Arraigning Ancestors: A Critique ofHistorical Contrition,” North Carolina Law Review 87 (2009):901–966.

23 Patrick Henry to Robert Pleasants, January 18, 1773, inMoses Coit Tyler, Patrick Henry (Boston, 1887), 209.

24 Mark Bograd, “Apologies Accepted: Facing up to Slave Reali-ties at Historic House Museums,” History News 47:1 (January—February 1992): 20–21.

25 Jonathan Raban, Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America(Pan Macmillan, 1991), 218.

26 Wendell Phillips, Speech at Franklin Hall, May 12, 1848,quoted in George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psy-chological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (Norton, 1979),130.

27 State v. Mann, 13 N.C. (2 Dev.) (1829), 264, 266. See Mark V.Tushnet, Slave Law in the American South: State v. Mann in His-tory and Literature (University Press of Kansas, 2003).

28 Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin [1853](Kennikat Press, 1968), 78–79.

29 Gillian K. Cowlishaw, “Cultures of Complaint,” Journal of So-ciology 42 (2006): 442.

30 William Pfaff, “Too Bad for Them, They Should Have BeenMore Like Us,” Baltimore Sun, July 18, 1996.

31 Russell Baker, “Sorry about That,” New York Times, July 1,1997, 21.

32 John T. Noonan, Jr., A Church That Can and Cannot Change:The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching (University of NotreDame Press, 2005), 201, 197.

33 Thomas Browne, Christian Morals [1670s], Works (London,1852), 3: 93.

34 John E.E. Dahlberg Acton, “Inaugural Lecture on the Studyof History” (1895), in his Lectures on Modern History (Macmillan,1906), 25–28, quoting Albert de Broglie, Discours . . . pour la ré-ception de M. Albert Sorel (1895).

35 John E.E. Dahlberg Acton, “A History of the Inquisition ofthe Middle Ages. By Henry Charles Lea” (English Historical Re-view, 1888), in his The History of Freedom and Other Essays(Macmillan, 1922), 572. See Perez Zagorin, “Lord Acton’s Or-deal: The Historian and Moral Judgment,” Virginia Quarterly Re-view 74 (Winter 1998): 1–17.

36 Creighton to Acton, April 9, 1887, in Louise Creighton, TheLife and Letters of Mandell Creighton, D.D., 2 vols (Longmans,1906), 1: 374–75.

37 Henry Charles Lea, “Ethical Values in History,” 1903 Ameri-can Historical Association presidential address, American Histori-cal Review 9 (1904): 234–39.

38 Noonan, Church That Can and Cannot Change, 200.

39 Thomas Babbington Macaulay, “Sir James Macintosh”(1835), in his Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edin-burgh Review, 5 vols. (Longmans, 1903), 2: 68.

40 Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations (Collins,1951), 120, 124–25.

41 Paul Johnson, “When Is God Going to Apologise for Rain-ing Fire and Brimstone on Sodom?” Spectator, November 8,1997, 28. See Avery Cardinal Dulles, “Should the Church Re-pent?” (1988), in his Church and Society: The Lawrence J. McGinleyLectures, 1988—2007 (Fordham University Press, 2008),262–275.

42 Albert Frederick Pollard, “Historical Criticism,” History 5(1920): 29.

43 W. G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn (Harvill, 1998), 125.

44 Henry St. John Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use ofHistory, 2 vols (London, 1752), 1: 32.

45 Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia’s Lovers [1863] (J.M. Dent, 1964),58–59

46 Lewis Namier, Conflicts: Studies in Contemporary History(Macmillan, 1942), 70.

47 Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed (HarperCollins, 1996), 238.Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Lenin lived! Lenin lives! Lenin will liveforever!” (1924) was constantly recited in Soviet schools and atparty gatherings.

48 William James Booth, Communities of Memory: On Witness, Iden-tity, and Justice (Cornell University Press, 2006), 62–63.

49 William James Booth, “The Work of Memory: Time, Iden-tity, and Injustice,” Social Research 75 (2008): 250.

50 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”(1940), in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (Schocken,1969), 256.

51 Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Leave the Statue, to Remember,” NewYork Times, July 17, 2012; idem, “The Paterno Statue ComesDown,” Atlantic, July 22, 2012.

52 Maureen Dowd: “Paterno Sacked Off His Pedestal,” NewYork Times, July 21, 2012.

53 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 3 vols. (Penguin,1983), 1: 923–24.

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