This book explores how societies put the past to use and how, in the process, they represented it: in short, their historical culture. It brings together anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars to address the means by which societies, groups, and individuals have engaged with the past and expressed their understanding of it. The utility of the past has proven almost as infinitely variable as the modes of its representation. It might be a matter of learning lessons from experience, or about the legitimacy of a cause or regime, or the reputation of an individual. Rival versions and interpretations reflected, but also helped to create and sustain, divergent communities and world views. With so much at stake, manipulations, distortions, and myths proliferated. But given also that evidence of past societies was fragmentary, fragile, and fraught with difficulties for those who sought to make sense of it, imaginative leaps and creativity necessarily came into the equation. Paradoxically, the very idea that the past was indeed useful was generally bound up with an image of history as inherently truthful. But then notions of truth proved malleable, even within one society, culture, or period. Concerned with what engagements with the past can reveal about the wider intellectual and cultural frameworks they took place within, this book is of relevance to anyone interested in how societies, communities, and individuals have acted on their historical consciousness.

About the Author
Peter Lambert is Lecturer in Modern European History at Aberystwyth University. He works on historical culture in Nazi Germany, and the professionalization of History in the twentieth century. Publications include Mass Dictatorship as Ever-Present Past (2013), Historikerdialoge (2004), and Making History (2003). He is currently completing a study on the reception of Widukind and Charlemagne in the Third Reich. Bjoern Weiler is Professor in History at Aberystwyth University. A historian of high medieval Europe, he has held visiting fellowships in Bergen, Cambridge (UK), Freiburg im Breisgau, and at Harvard. Publications include England and Europe in the Reign of Henry III (with Ifor Rowlands, 2002), King Henry III of England and the Staufen Empire (2006), Kingship, Rebellion and Political Culture (2007), and Representations of Power in Medieval Germany (with Simon MacLean, 2006). He is working on a book on the experience of the past in high medieval Europe.

Reviews
Even when focusing on non-European or pre-1700 history, the authors question what makes America great, how war and warriors should be remembered, and what place women, minority cultures, and the Other hold... Recommended * CHOICE *



Book Information
ISBN 9780197266120
Author Peter Lambert
Format Hardback
Page Count 330
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 690g
Dimensions(mm) 244mm * 169mm * 26mm