bigideas

Last night’s Big Ideas at the Wheatsheaf covered the question, “Is Heritage History?” In the fact the question was just a jumping-off point the practice of history, the value of the concept of heritage and how this all relates to identity.

I covered some basic historiography, introducing the notion of a development of mainstream history writing from Herodotus through Enlightenment historians such as Edward Gibbon to modern history. I introduced the importance of primary sources to modern historians whose ideal is a dispassionate, objective view of the past.

I then looked at what constitutes heritage. I used David Lowenthal’s The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History as a starting point to describe the variety of artifacts, traditions and curated shows that make what we might call heritage. Some might see heritage as bad history, but the divide between academic history and heritage practice is a lot more blurred in my view.

I also used two other texts last night: On History by Eric Hobsbawm and an essay by Hobsbawm called “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914″ from the book The Invention of Tradition (edited by Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger).