Download Free The Representation Of The Past Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Representation Of The Past and write the review.

The 1980s and early 1990s have seen a marked increase in public interest in our historic environment. The museum and heritage industry has expanded as the past is exploited for commercial profit. In The Representation of the Past, Kevin Walsh examines this international trend and questions the packaging of history which serves only to distance people from their own heritage. A superficial, unquestioning portrayal of the past, he feels, separates us from an understanding of our cultural and political present. Here, Walsh suggests a number of ways in which the museum can fulfill its potential - by facilitating our comprehension of cultural identity.
This unique book critically evaluates the virtual representation of the past through digital media. A distinguished team of leading experts in the field approach digital research in history and archaeology from contrasting viewpoints, including philosophical, methodological and technical. They illustrate the challenges involved in representing the past digitally by focusing on specific cases of a particular historical period, place or technical problem.
History has always been more than just the past. It involves a relationship between past and present, perceived, on the one hand, as a temporal chain of events and, on the other, symbolically as an interpretation that gives meaning to these events through varying cultural orientations, charging it with norms and values, hopes and fears. And it is memory that links the present to the past and therefore has to be seen as the most fundamental procedure of the human mind that constitutes history: memory and historical thinking are the door of the human mind to experience. At the same time, it transforms the past into a meaningful and sense bearing part of the present and beyond. It is these complex interrelationships that are the focus of the contributors to this volume, among them such distinguished scholars as Paul Ricoeur, Johan Galtung, Eberhard Lämmert, and James E. Young. Full of profound insights into human society pat and present it is a book that not only historians but also philosophers and social scientists should engage with.
This collection of essays concentrates on the structures and connections which have made it possible, over the last two centuries, for an integrated regime of historical representation to emerge. It also touches upon the debate about the contemporary uses of history - whether it is a matter of new versus traditional approaches to the school curriculum, or of the need to historicize museums, houses and gardens and so avoid the blandness of an uninformed display.
"Social Construction of the Past examines labour, race and gender and its relationship to power and class. It includes chapters on a broad range of topics, from the role of intellectuals in restructuring a non-apartheid South Africa, to Haitian working-class women using sexuality to resist domination. It should be essential reading for academics and students from a whole range of different social and intellectual backgrounds, including anthropology, archaeology, history, comparative literature, political science and sociology."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Illustrating the Past is a study of the status of visual and verbal media in early modern English representations of the past. It focuses on general attitudes towards visual and verbal representations of history as well as specific illustrated books produced during the period. Through a close examination of the relationship of image to text in light of contemporary discussions of poetic and aesthetic practice, the book demonstrates that the struggle between the image and the word played a profoundly important role in England's emergent historical self-awareness. The opposition between history and story, fact and fiction, often tenuous, provided a sounding board for deeper conflicts over the form in which representations might best yield truth from history. The ensuing schism between poets and historians over the proper venue for the lessons of the past manifested itself on the pages of early modern printed books. The discussion focuses on the word and image relationships in several important illustrated books printed during the second half of the sixteenth century-including Holinshed's Chronicles (1577) and Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563, 1570)-in the context of contemporary works on history and poetics, such as Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry and Thomas Blundeville's The true order and Method of wryting and reading Hystories. Illustrating the Past specifically answers two important questions concerning the resultant production of literary and historical texts in the period: Why did the use of images in printed histories suddenly become unpopular at the end of the sixteenth century? and What impact did this publishing trend have on writers of literary and historical texts?
Focusing on the notion of representation and on the necessity of distinguishing between representation and description, this book argues that the traditional semantic apparatus of meaning, truth, and reference that we use for description must be redefined if we are to understand properly the nature of historical writing.
Film and television have been accepted as having a pervasive influence on how people understand the world. An important aspect of this is the relationship of history and film. The different views of the past created by film, television, and video are only now attracting closer attention from historians, cultural critics, and filmmakers. This volume seeks to advance the critical exploration scholars have recently begun. Barta begins by addressing the various ways the past is screened for our understanding and relates the art of film to other media. The essays that follow deal primarily with the changing perspectives of political and social developments—and changing concepts of ideology, gender, or culture—in films and television programs made for historically shaped reasons. Chapters by filmmakers explore issues of context and intent in their own projects. Scholars and general readers interested in film and cultural studies will find this an important volume.
In this book, the noted intellectual historian Frank Ankersmit provides a systematic account of the problems of reference, truth, and meaning in historical writing. He works from the conviction that the historicist account of historical writing, associated primarily with Leopold von Ranke and Wilhelm von Humboldt, is essentially correct but that its original idealist and romanticist idiom needs to be translated into more modern terms. Rehabilitating historicism for the contemporary philosophy of history, he argues, "reveals the basic truths about the nature of the past itself, how we relate to it, and how we make sense of the past in historical writing." At the heart of Ankersmit's project is a sharp distinction between interpretation and representation. The historical text, he holds, is first and foremost a representation of some part of the past, not an interpretation. The book's central chapters address the concept of historical representation from the perspectives of reference, truth, and meaning. Ankersmit then goes on to discuss the possible role of experience in the history writing, which leads directly to a consideration of subjectivity and ethics in the historian's practice. Ankersmit concludes with a chapter on political history, which he maintains is the "basis and condition of all other variants of historical writing." Ankersmit’s rehabilitation of historicism is a powerfully original and provocative contribution to the debate about the nature of historical writing.
The 'visual' has long played a crucial role in forming experiences, associations, expectations and understandings of heritage. Images convey meaning within a range of practices, including tourism, identity construction, the popularization of the past through a variety of media, and the memorialization of events. However, despite the central role of 'the visual' in these contexts, it has been largely neglected in heritage literature. This edited collection is the first to explore the production, use and consumption of visual imagery as an integral part of heritage. Drawing on case studies from around the world, it provides a multidisciplinary analysis of heritage representations, combining complex understandings of the 'visual' from a wide range of disciplines, including heritage studies, sociology and cultural studies perspectives. In doing so, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical and methodological tools necessary for understanding visual imagery within its cultural context.