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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
Abuse of history, as just shown, seems the gravest of heritage sins. How just is this charge? We can judge only by clarifying what both history and heritage seek to do. That is my aim in the next three chapters. This chapter surveys history as an enterprise distinct from heritage and explains why their differences render criticisms of heritage as “bad history” null and void.
History is protean. What it is, what people think it should be, and how it is told and heard all depend on perspectives peculiar to particular times and places. An American scholar in 1948 likened Clio, the muse of history, to a career woman (she had once been a social butterfly); in the Soviet Union, Clio was more likely to be a streetwalker or a bureaucrat.
We all screen history through manifold lenses. Carl Becker's 1931 presidential address to American historians described how “Everyman” patterns history out of a thousand largely unremarked and unrelated sources:
from things learned at home and in school, from knowledge gained in business or profession, from newspapers glanced at, from books (yes, even history books) read or heard of, from remembered scraps of newsreels or educational films or ex-cathedra utterances of presidents and kings, from fifteen-minute discourses on the history of civilization broadcast by courtesy … of Pepsodent, the Bulova Watch Company, or the Shepard Stores in Boston.
Today you and I chronicle our own impressions out of materials now quite different from, but no less diversified than, those of Becker's Everyman.
Such pastiches of the past are as idiosyncratic in today's Britain as in 1930s America.
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