The Imagined Past edited by C Shaw and M Chase

Doesn't seem to be available to buy but I got hold of it via inter-library loan :-)

A slim collection of essays, which explore the ways in which the past has political power – we probably accept “nostalgia” as an interpretation which might not give the whole truth, but tend to see “history” as political neutral (although some many have pointed out that all history is selective and generally written by the “victors” how many really is it as neutral is questionable).

Most of the thoughts explored in the collection make sense to me, but few were new to me – but I guess should acknowledge it is 30 years old, and maybe when published in 1989 the collection was more radical, ideas that were new then have largely become mainstream now?

Some specific thoughts…

In the introductory essay Shaw and Chase reflect that “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” But I wonder if that is still true, or true in the same way, in our current age of the constant selfie.

They go on to quote Raymond Williams “It only takes two generations to make anything traditional...” but in my experience “tradition” can be established much more rapidly than that, a couple of years rather than a couple of generations is usually plenty of time to have cemented a practice as traditional, and even sacrosanct.

While David Lowenthal makes a key point, saying that “No one ever experienced as “the present” what we now view as “the past”, for hindsight cannot clarify today as it does yesterday; the past as reconstructed is always more coherent than when it happened.” and so “...history reveals and nostalgia celebrates an ordered clarity contrasting with the chaos or imprecision of our own times.”

Malcolm Chase begins his own essay with a quote from Arthur Gardner’s 1942 book Britain’s Mountain Heritage “When we think of England we do not picture crowded factories or rows of suburban villas, but our thoughts turn to rolling hills, green fields and stately trees, to cottage homes, picturesquely grouped round the village green beside the church and manor house. It is a green and pleasant land.” This is still largely true, and it becomes challenging because it tends to render those who are “of the City” as excluded from authentic expression of “English”

The collection ends with essay by Andy Croft about how the 1930s are remembered. Despite being the decade of the Great Depression, the decade that the world slid back towards a War World, and many other negative features, Croft shows that the 1930s is recalled as a Golden Age, and that recollection is not politically neutral. He is writing in the late 1980s, so with a 50 year gap, which gave the 1930s the chronological relationship we now have with the 1960s however I think many of the features of the memory of the 1930s Croft identifies are still true. The 1930s perhaps still feel more recent than they really are, and more positive than they really were – and we need to be alert to whose narrative of the present that does most to support.