Background
Lowenthal, David was born on April 26, 1923 in New York City. Son of Max and Eleanor (Mack) Lowenthal.
(The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-c...)
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, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521616859/?tag=2022091-20
(In this remarkably wide-ranging book Professor Lowenthal ...)
In this remarkably wide-ranging book Professor Lowenthal analyses the ever-changing role of the past in shaping our lives. A heritage at once nurturing and burdensome, the past allows us to make sense of the present whilst imposing powerful constraints upon the way that present develops. Some aspects of the past are celebrated, others expunged, as each generation reshapes its legacy in line with current needs. Drawing on all the arts, the humanities and the social sciences, the author uses sources as diverse as science fiction and psychoanalysis to examine how rebellion against inherited tradition has given rise to the modern cult of preservation and pervasive nostalgia. Profusely illustrated, The Past is a Foreign Country shows that although the past has ceased to be a sanction for inherited power or privilege, as a focus of personal and national identity and as a bulwark against massive and distressing change it remains as potent a force as ever in human affairs.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521294800/?tag=2022091-20
(Heritage, while it often constitutes and defines the most...)
Heritage, while it often constitutes and defines the most positive aspects of culture, is a malleable body of historical text subject to interpretation and easily twisted into myth. When it is appealed to on a national or ethnic level in reactions against racial, religious, or economic oppression, the result is often highly-charged political contention or conflict. The extraordinary theme of this unique book is how the rise of a manifold, crusade-like obsession with tradition and inheritance--both physical and cultural--can lead to either good or evil. In a balanced account of the pros and cons of the rhetoric and spoils of heritage--on the one hand cultural identity and unity, on the other, potential holy war--David Lowenthal discusses the myriad uses and abuses of historical appropriation and offers a rare and accessible account of a concept at once familiar and fraught with complexity. David Lowenthal is Emeritus Professor of Geography at University College London, and the author of the bestselling The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521635624/?tag=2022091-20
(George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) was the first to reveal ...)
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’s rights, and to historical stewardship resonate more than ever. His Vermont birthplace is now a national park chronicling American conservation, and the crusade he launched is now global. Marsh’s seminal book Man and Nature is famed for its ecological acumen. The clue to its inception lies in Marsh’s many-sided engagement in the life of his time. The broadest scholar of his day, he was an acclaimed linguist, lawyer, congressman, and renowned diplomat who served 25 years as U.S. envoy to Turkey and to Italy. He helped found and guide the Smithsonian Institution, shaped the Washington Monument, penned potent tracts on fisheries and on irrigation, spearheaded public science, art, and architecture. He wrote on camels and corporate corruption, Icelandic grammar and Alpine glaciers. His pungent and provocative letters illuminate life on both sides of the Atlantic. Like Darwin’s Origin of Species, Marsh’s Man and Nature marked the inception of a truly modern way of looking at the world, of taking care lest we irreversibly degrade the fabric of humanized nature we are bound to manage. Marsh’s ominous warnings inspired reforestation, watershed management, soil conservation, and nature protection in his day and ours. George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation was awarded the Association for American Geographers' 2000 J. B. Jackson Prize. The book was also on the shortlist for the first British Academy Book Prize, awarded in December 2001.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0295983159/?tag=2022091-20
Lowenthal, David was born on April 26, 1923 in New York City. Son of Max and Eleanor (Mack) Lowenthal.
Lowenthal earned his Doctor of Philosophy in History from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Prior to this he graduated with a Bachelor of Surgery in History from Harvard University in 1944 and an Master of Arts
He is renowned for his work on heritage and spatial concepts of the past and future. He is Emeritus Professor of Geography at University College London. In Geography from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950.
He is a specialist on the 19th century North American philologist, geographer and environmentalist George Perkins Marsh, whose work laid the foundations of the environmental conservation movement in the United States of America.
He has advised international heritage agencies and institutions, including United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the International Council on Monuments and Sites, the International Council of Museums, International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, the Getty Conservation Institute, the World Monuments Fund, the Council of Europe, Europa Nostra, English Heritage, the United States. National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Trust of Australia, and the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage. His historical analysis of the ever-changing role of the past in shaping our lives, The Past is a Foreign Country (1985), is widely considered to be a classic text.
Lowenthal has been awarded several medals by institutions around the world. These include:
In 1965, Lowenthal received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
(Heritage, while it often constitutes and defines the most...)
(George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) was the first to reveal ...)
(In this remarkably wide-ranging book Professor Lowenthal ...)
(The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-c...)
(Rare book: Price in USD)
(A general overview.)
(Hardcover)
Georgian Group delegate Harrow Conservation Area Advisory Committee, 1987—1997. Secretary, director Crown St. and Area Residents Association, Harrow, 1974—2001. Member American Association for the Advancement of Science (councilor 1964-1971), Society for Caribbean Studies (founding chair 1977-1979), Landscape Research Group (chair 1984-1989), International Cultural Property Society (editorial board since 1989).
Married Mary A. Lamberty, October 16, 1970.