Heritage Debates Flashcards

Question

John James Stevenson

Answer 1

crit Viollet-le-duc 'unintentionally amusing' portions of polychrome niches restored in exact imitations of the old colouring, but found necessary sometimes completely to repaint them, in consequence of the discovery in the old work of some colour w which the new work would not harmonize From this we may judge of the uncertainty of the restoration, and its authenticity in telling us what the old work was

Answer 2

everything made by man's hands had a form, beautiful or ugly. 'beautiful if in accordance w Nature, and helps her' Agreed w Carlyle and Ruskin that the art of any epoch should be the expression of its social life, but that the current social life did not allow this

Answer 3

until then, 1/3 of the stained glass production of Morris' company went for old buildings After that, no more commissions for windows in ancient buildings

Answer 4

Repair of Ancient Buildings - summarised the principles and showed how duties of caring for ancient buildings may be performed so that work may be done with the least alteration to the qualities which make a building worthy of notice - workmanship, form, colour, texture

Answer 5

Schemes to add to Westminster Abbey and rebuild Weston Hall, to demolish the old school buildings at Eton and two classical churches in London, St Mary at Hill and St Mary-le-Strand

Answer 6

San Marco in Venice Moris public lectures Petition with over a thousand signatures presented to Italian Ministry of Education

Answer 7

national law for protection of historic buildings 30 March 1887 Anatole France - strongly attacked Viollet-le-Duc for his restorations at Pierrefonds and Notre Dame of Paris, and like Victor Hugo emphasised the import of preserving the national memory in the authentic stones not only of historic buildings but of historic towns

Answer 8

Palace of Westminster, St Pancras Station

Answer 9

• 1865 - the Commons Preservation Society (today Open Spaces Society) • 1884 - National Footpaths Preservation Society (today Open Spaces Society) • 1877 - Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings 1895 - National Trusts

Answer 10

Viollet-le-Duc: * Fr architect * Famous for preserv of medieval Fr architecture * Oversaw restoration of celebrated Fr historic sites * Notre Dame restoration * Made changes to make seem more medieval than before. Took away modifications from between medieval and 19th C. Added more gargoyles. Added central spire. Act of creativity, not just preservation. Turning it into what he imagined medieval church to look like * Cathar stronghold. Walled city in Pyrenees. Le Duc put in charge of restorations. Bulldozed past additions. Destroyed Cathar archaeology. Turned relic of Cathar soc into symbol of Fr national prestige. Went out of way to make building look/ feel more like what he imagined medieval architecture to look like. Returning to pristine moment Term restoration and thing itself = modern. To restore is not to preserve, repair or rebiild. It is to reinstate to condition of completeness that cld never have existed at any given time. No clear def * Emph on restoration as modern * Pristine, idealise version of Middle Ages - central to his ideology of what conservation must be * Writings profound impact on what architects doing in Br

Answer 11

* Lively debate over what that meant for Br society * Upsurge in museums opening * Hewson - 100s opened every year 70s and 80s * Notable new activity around nation's past * Mid-1980s expend of depart of envi on heritage = 86 million. * SAVE, 1975 - publically campaigned for pub histor builds * Industrial to service economy * Interest in industrial heritage incr * Big pit coal mine Blaenavon. Closed after miner's strike * Telford Ironbridge Gorge museum. Later postwar period iron industry left. Ironbridge Gorge Trust 1968, Museum 1973

Answer 12

• 1979 - couldn't believe what had happened to the country, having spent 5 years living in North America, mostly in Vancouver • 'I felt as if I had stumbled inadvertantly into some sort of anthropological museum • Disturbed by passion for conservation • Material interest in past becoming cult • These versions of past culturally produced • Heritage past = imaginary realm • Ppl of 1980s must learn to critique pastoral, pure England as construction by enemies of modernity • Reactionary counterculture • Deep England mainly aristocratic or bourgeois • Implied natural Eng hierarchy corrupted by Democracy, immigration etc Heritage closely allied w Thatcherite project and return to Victorian value cultural manipulation pervades contemporary British society - not least in endless public invocations of the national identity and tradition

Answer 13

diagnosis of museum section: tame past by giving new function. Tamed. Potency destroyed. Ancestors displayed and made harmless. Once memorialised loses ability to harm present. Past complex and destabilising E.g. closing mills and pits - abandonment of working class, decline of industry

Answer 14

ndivid museums fine institutions • Collectively their growth in num points to imaginative death of country • Worthy aims but together show country obsessed w past and unable to face future • Crit heritage industry not just bc many products fantasy of world that never was, not just bc involves reasserting Victorian values, but bc worsens climate of decline • If only new thing we have to offer is improved version of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change • Move from progressivism of postwar period to more conservative society

Answer 15

* Heritage arrived as progressive force, educationally and architecturally * Examples on BB * Open air museums, derided today as quintessence of conservatism, were at outset, in 1960s, in hands of museums profession's young Turnks - curators who (BB) * Heritage not inherently conservative force. Emerged from progressivism/ socialism/ Radicalism * Criticises critique/ condescention aimed at heritage industry from jealousy. High culture world of history in academy little traction on pop consciously whereas hist in open air museums etc receiving much more pop attent influence

Answer 16

* Practitioner academic * Of kind Samuel speaks of * Museum teaches past through getting volunteers involved and tactile experience * Ironbridge pushing at what historical work could be

Answer 17

'Once confined to a handful of museums and antique shops, the trappings of history now festoon the whole country. All memorabilia are cherished, from relics of the Revolution to artifacts from Auschwitz Americans en masse find comfort in looking back British conservationists mount guard on everything from old churches to ancient countrysided, deplore the drain of heritage across the Atlantic, and solace present discontents with past glories' Perspective of past as foreign country is a recent one. Only in late 18th C was past conceived as diff realm. Venerated as font of communal identity, cherished as precious and endangered resource, yesterday less and less like today The more it is appreciated for its own sake, the less real or relevant the past becomes Nostalgia transcends yearnings for lost childhoods and scenes of early life, embracing imagined pasts never experienced by their devotees or perhaps by anyone Benefits of the past: Familiarity of recognition; reaffirmation of belief and action; guidance of example; awareness of personal and communal identity; diachronic enrichment of present experience; respites or escapes from the pace and pressure of the here and now Drawbacks: forgeting or obliterating malign or traumatic hist Glorious heritage may overwhelm, its superiority extinguishing even the will to rival it. Traditional or inherited perspectives may seem pernicious to all but their few inheritors, and sometimes even to them. The past itself is gone - all that survives are its material residues and the accounts of those who experienced it. No such evd can tell us about the past with absolute certainty Canons of historical inquiry and consensually shared data set historical knowledge on a seemingly firmer footing than what is known from memory alone. Every account of the past is both more and less than that past What historians do depends on present views of what history ought to be about. Historians always rewrite the past from the standpoint of the present The past is not dead, as J H Plumb would have it; it is not even sleeping. A mass of memories and records, of relics and replicas... lives at the core of our being. And as we remake it, the past remakes us Nostalgia's profitability incites real estate agents to drum up interest by digging out every shred of history N = mem with the pain removed What pleases the nostalgist - less the memory of what actually was than of what was once thought possible. Mistrust of the future fuels today's nostalgia Retrospective nostalgia coexists with impatient modernism. Revolutionaries exorcise recent evils by appealing to older exempars, and end by resucitating what they once rejected All awareness of the past is founded on memory. Through recollection we recover consciousness of former events, distinguished yesterday from today, and confirm that we have experienced the past Remembering the past is crucial for our sense of identity, to know what we were confirms that we are. Self-continuity depends wholly on memory History extends and elaborates memory by interpreting relics and synthesizing reports from past eyewitnesses. For all the expertise of historians and archaeologists, history remains, in Rosemary Harris's phrase, 'something of an odd, semi-fictional subject, part fact, part myth, and guesswork' Just as memory validates personal identity, history perpetuates self-awareness historical knowledge invariably subjective Historical facts are timeless and discontinuous until woven together in stories. We do not experience a flow of time, only a succession of situations and events The segregation of historical from fictional narrative was a by-product of late-Renaissance concern about the validity and accuracy of historical sources. Previously fused in classical and medieval epic Interaction with a heritage continually alters its nature and context, whether by choice or by chance Display arouses the impulse to conserve, but also increases the need for it Seeing the past in our own terms, we necessarily revise what previous interpreters have seen in their terms, and reshape artefacts and memories accordingly. We alter the past to become part of it as well as to make it our own. Modern parents still follow Henry James's duchess. 'We take the children to Stonehenge', writes Penelope Lively, 'but we'd probably shrink from exposing them to a candid account of Bronze Age beliefs and practices. We like the past gutted and nicely cleaned up.' The filth and stench of early town life, the foraging of pigs in city streets, the din of horse-drawn vehicles on cobblestones, the terror of pain before modern anaesthesia, are never reproduced Nothing seems too horrendous to commemorate - Auschwitz, now World Heritage site In defiance of known facts we continue to envisage a rose-coloured past Remaking the past to embody their own wished-for virtues was a major Victorian enterprise. By modernizing the greeks and archaizing themsleves, the Victorians could view the ancients as living contemporaries Paradox implicit in preservation - itself reveals that permanence is an illusion. We suspend erosion of remains only to transform them in other ways Plumb's conclusions dubious. Cult of nostalgia, yearning for roots, demand for heritage, passion for preservation show that the spell of the past remains potent a patrimony simply preserved becomes an intolerable burden; the past is best used by being domesticated - and by our accepting and rejoicing that we do so. The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively.

Answer 18

'The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there'

Answer 19

The Death of the Past, 1969 'objective' history based on firm canons of evd has largely dispelled dependence on a fixed and fearsome past

Answer 20

The lengthened and deepened past has become almost omnipresent, engulfing the media and personal memory. Yet at the same time collective memories have withered away. While historians know more and more about the past, the public at large knows less and less, and what is commonly known is increasingly recent, trivial, and ephemeral. Both in private proliferation and public demise, the past comes to resemble the present. Domesticated into today, it is ever less a foreign country. Memory overwhelms history, and authoritative understanding succumbs to untutored surmise Cynical doubts assail the entire corpus of the past Corollary of conflating the past within the present is failure to realize that bygone people lived according to other codes Linking the living, the dead, and those to come as a continuing community, we become responsible for the past in its entirety. Informed tolerance toward our total legacy is a necessary condition of enhancing the present and enabling the future Nostalgia is today's favoured mode of looking back. It saturates the press, serves as advertising bait, merits sociological study, expresses modern malaise Victorian Britain: Assaults against customary ways provoked regressive defence of past tradition in medievalist fancies of the 1830s and 40s Industrialization further spurred looking back Many take refuge in the past as an antidote to present disappointments and future fears. They hark back to the fancied benefits, even to the fearsome burdens, of times of lost purity and simplicity, lapsed immediacy and certitude, in some Golden age of classical serenity, Christian faith, pastoral plenitude, or childhood innocence Decline of import of the past. In today's digital age, intellectual legacy of the past little relevance in schooling. Hence the growing tendency to flatter children that their values are more enlightened than elders new admiration of historical ignorance We have lost the ready familiarity with the classical and biblical heritage that long imprinted European culture and environment

Answer 21

everyday life is above all situated. It always occurs in relation to a person's immediate locality: 'the terrain of a king's everyday life is not his country but his court'

Answer 22

The British heritage industry has long been a subject for debate in the UK, with critics arguing that heritage invests history with a nostalgic idealism that sanitizes and simplifies the nation’s past. This article examines Blists Hill Victorian Town, a British living history museum that purports to re-create everyday industrial life of the 1890s, within the context of these debates, arguing that Blists Hill portrays the late-Victorian period with more complexity than many critics would allow. Shifting the lens of how such sites have typically been evaluated—away from questions of authenticity, to instead focus on how living history museums engage visitors in meaningful play—I consider the ways that Blists Hill promotes creative learning through an imaginative, visceral engagement with history. Blists Hill Victorian Town is an English open-air museum, located in the formerly industrial region of Shropshire One of ten interlinked museums in the area known as the Ironbridge Gorge, Blists Hill is an immersive museum that invites its visitors to ‘‘[e]xperience life as it was over 100 years ago through the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of a recreated Victorian Town.’ Blists Hill appears frequently in these debates, with Bob West devoting an entire article to accusing Blists Hill of promoting a ‘‘spectacle’’ of idealized Victorian labor, and Hewison deriding the museum as having the ‘‘authenticity of a film set.’ If we shift our view away from debates that define heritage in terms of ‘‘real’’ versus ‘‘fake’’ history, and instead consider how authenticity functions in relation to the imagination, then Blists Hill— simulated history though it may be—becomes a space for creative learning, based in bodily experience and human interaction. The IGMT has explicitly disavowed nostalgia as an aim of the Ironbridge museums.22 One of its early directors, Stuart Smith, explained his approach to heritage and heritage museums by warning that, [i]f you are not careful you will wallow in nostalgia, in this sort of myth that the past was wonderful. I personally believe the past was awful Costumed workers at Blists Hill exhibit a variety of skills, many emphasizing the fact that most of these skills have now been relegated to the domain of ‘‘hobby’’ or have been lost altogether For example, on one of my visits, Blists Hill’s lace maker explained to the visitors gathered around her work table how the rise of mechanized lace in the early- and mid-nineteenth-century devastated the handmade lace industry and destroyed the livelihood of thousands of lace makers in Britain Blists Hill presents an implicit argument that change is the basis of history. what constitutes an ‘‘authentic’’ experience of a fake town? If we were to define ‘‘authentic’’ as descriptive only of those things that actually came from the nineteenth century, then Blists Hill, with its mixture of original and reconstructed buildings, would fail to qualify Visitors are able to report authenticity as one of Blists Hill’s great assets, even as their guidebooks declare that ‘‘Blists Hill is not a real town,’’52 because their sense of Blists Hill’s authenticity is not contingent on historical reality. Although there are homes and a church to walk through, animals to visit, and ironworks to tour, the bulk of the town is made up of Victorian shops. In each one, the visitor can interact with Victorian objects and tools, converse with the costumed interpreters, and purchase souvenirs. These keepsakes include objects made by traditional methods in Blists Hill In declaring the opposition of historical representation and money-making, West ignores the centrality of commercialism within the late-Victorian social world Interactivity is crucial to the success of Blists Hill as an engaging learning environment. As Dicks points out, visitors decode heritage sites of all kinds, actively interpreting even ‘‘traditional’’ heritage exhibits in conjunction with their own points of view. However, Blists Hill, like many other living history museums, foregrounds the process of decoding, explicitly presenting the visitor with the task of deciphering the museum’s messages. Unlike traditional museums that direct their guests from one exhibit to another in a prescribed order, in Blists Hill, tourists are relatively free to roam. Open-air and living history museums, though increasingly common within the heritage landscape, are still often saddled with the derogatory label of ‘‘theme park.’’ ‘‘Theme park’’ is not, in fact, an inaccurate term for Blists Hill—it is, after all, a simulated space dedicated to the entertainment of tourists. But while ‘‘theme park’’ has long been used as a catch-all for the passivity, sentimentality, and inauthenticity of contemporary tourism, a close look at Blists Hill shows how the simulation and make-believe of the theme park can further a more complicated approach to history than such a label would suggest, an approach that presents history as a process of continual change Rooted in play, living history and heritage reconstruction mediate the space between a distantly perceived past and the immediacy of lived experience, between knowing something to be true and feeling it as an integrated part of one’s intellectual and emotional life. Counterintuitively, it is through the experience of make-believe that history gains a sense of personal reality

Answer 23

Lara Rutherford-Morrison: ‘‘heritage’’ as a concept has been used to cover a broad swath of the historical landscape and can include remnants of the physical past, such as buildings, furniture, and machines, as well as harder to quantify cultural objects, like historically bound skill sets, aesthetics, and folk music When freed from models that place heritage within a few carefully curated historical objects, or that reject heritage as uncritical sentimentality, the concept instead emerges as a complex interplay of history, communal and individual memory, emotion, and material culture. A heritage site is effective to the extent that it can direct visitors’ memories and expectations toward an intellectual and emotional investment in the history being portrayed; this investment, in turn, is vital to achieving the site’s educational goals. In the case of heritage tourism, the meaning of ‘‘authenticity’’ is even more tenuous, and its fantasy aspects more obvious. What would it mean for a contemporary person to experience the past in an authentic way?

Answer 24

heritage is dominated by what she labels the ‘‘authorized heritage discourse.’’4 This discourse, embedded in the charters of heritage agencies and state institutions across the globe, locates heritage within culturally significant objects, and figures the primary work of heritage organizations to be the preservation of these objects. In this construction, authority over heritage rests firmly in the hands of experts, who are responsible for preserving and interpreting heritage artifacts, while protecting them from the masses. Early manifestations of British heritage tended to be of the ‘‘stately home’’ variety, with an emphasis on preserving the homes of the elite. This type of heritage, still popular today, typifies the authorized heritage discourse. heritage is not simply a ‘‘thing’’ to be consumed, nor is the visitor an empty vessel into which preordained messages can be poured.41 until recently, the authenticity of ‘‘traditional’’ British heritage sites like stately homes has largely gone unquestioned.4

Answer 25

‘‘a loathsome collection of theme parks and dead values’’

Answer 26

Authenticity is not quantifiable, but is instead a perceived quality, based on a variety of factors that have little to do with objective historical accuracy or the preservation of real historical objects. As Smith and Magelssen have both noted, authenticity is a social construction;53 it is a relational concept, ‘‘produced in the interaction between exhibition and visitor.’’54 Bagnall describes this relation as specifically emotional in nature, arguing that authenticity arises from a sense of ‘‘emotional realism.’’ In this construction, authenticity lies, not within the object, but in the object’s ability to tap into the visitor’s subjective experience and evoke personal and familial memories.

Answer 27

public history: mostly for mass audience For some, import part of radical hist mvmnts critical of elitism, seeking to promote politically self-conscious, community-based histories Also tool of establishments 'history' in many senses - academic discipline; dissemination and display of its findings to wide audiences using all available media; past itself; diffused awareness of that past varying person to person, group to group Heritage: doesn't always claim to be instructing on history Not generally that interested in academic history Nonetheless contributes to ideas people hold of history/ past Museums - major cultural forces Highly refined past Original materials/ means by which processed/ rendered = almost invisible. Display only selected objects Can't allow full transparency Shape forms curiosity can take - convey narratives/ values about everyday life Operate within idiom of heroes and villains Likely to stress moral clarity and individual agency - from desire for patterns of responsibility Emotive National Trust, country houses - supposed to be as original as poss - problematic - houses evolve. Unlikely to be one time house evokes. Result = merge and creation of unspecified historical 'authenticity' Memorials: Typically affirm values upon which war based. Honour to personnel/ instigators. Different definitions of 'public': ``` For mass audience popular non-specialist of concern to an entire polity available for anyone to see government ``` creators of PH oft drawn from small cadres w highly specific agendas - contrast w amateur history - products of which not usually called PH collective identity shaped by education system, but further shaped + sustained, occasionally radially altered, by PH Three principal issues of PH - non-academic audiences 4 hist; general cultural uses for past; specific displays that relate to hist broadly defined State major role in shaping view of past - funding Controversy over plans 2 put Enola Gay - plane that dropped bomb on Hiroshima - on display at National Air+Space museum in Washington DC 1995 - impossible to present WW2 events neutrally Hist still loosely political even in more commercial forms - reproduction clothes - views of partic historical periods to general pub - priority to aristocratic Creating image of distinct eras e.g. 18th C elegant Inevitable tension between commemoration and analysis hist always implicitly moralising pop hists find multiple identities difficult to navigate no such thing as clear-cut moral polarities and simple answers diversity = helathy, but results must be transparent and able to be critically evaluated in both scholarly and public history Past is inspiring and instructive - not font of clear, unambiguous lessons and recipes Arena for contemplation/ thought

Answer 28

nation's history key element of unifying but abstract notion of 'nationhood'

Answer 29

from April 2008 conf in Liverpool exploring theoretical/ conceptual frameworks of PH North Americans surprised few from UK indent selves as p hists heritage debate of past 1/4 C over idolizing of stately homes and paternalistic values they allegedly represented. Also embodied more general critique of state's attempt to create cultural consensus about national history - Tory plot to prop up 'fading' Eng nat ident 2000 Eng Heritage poll - 98% of pop considered heritage import to ed. children about the past NT = largest private mem organisat in Europe Public Record Office launched 1901 census online Jan 2002. 29 mil users per day in 1st 4 days, threatened collapse of Br telephone network State promotion of heritage Heritage Lottery Fund 1994, by 2006 £38 billion to 24 000 heritage projects. Urged by govt to address social inclusion agenda Mandler optimism - serious hists can produce intellectually challenging wrk that stretches (wider) audiences more than in prev generations Proport of serious biographies and hist books by academic historians designed for wider public reading = much higher than 40 yrs ago. Wolfson Prize celebrates hist books of highest standard 4 general pub 2008 Institute of Historial Research interviews - Cannadine, Daunton, Morrill, rejected unhelpful academic h/ph dichotomies Jordanova/ Tosh - idea means of historical thinking and critical skills need to be conveyed as much as knowledge and content Tosh, practical historicism - set of transferable skills in how to approach issues, opening terms of debate and analysing its pluralistic nature Jordanova has crit Tosh for failing to consider fully obstacles in way of encouraging policymakers and pub to devel more informed underst of past. Must distinguish between diff challenges involved in engaging diff audiences/ publics in diff historical debates Ruskin College, PH MA for adults Kean - PH = people's history. Criticises Tosh's approach as too one-sided. We must recognise need to shre, participate, engage not as 'experts' but as ppl w interest in relat between past and present willing to explore, acknowl, value diff ways of configuring this HLF-funded project on 'Identity and the City: 1001 years of Ethnic Minorities in Bristol' Lee + Tucker, HLF-funded restoration and repair of Birkenhead Park, 1st UK park. Outreach to teach schoolchildren Conclude w plea - PH should encourage local participation but challenge stereotypes and assumptions, investing in long-term benefit to be derived from critical approach to historical record Lipscomb - re-interpretation of Hampton Court by Historic Royal Palaces in run-up to 500th anniversary of HenryVIII's accession. Audience-led approach History becomes public when shaped for audience to meet present demands irrespective of audience Comparison w Fr hists since 2005 - campaigning vs manipulation of pub mem by politics. Exert signif influence over pub opinion and policy-making Privileged voices protected by rigid consumer/ producer division