Constructing the Past

Ronald L. Grimes. Symbol and Conquest: Public Ritual and Drama in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976. 281 pp. $16.50.     

The Politics of the Past: Constructing a National Identity through Heritage Conservation

Modern nation‐states use images of a chosen past to construct a national identity. In Vilnius, the remains of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania are used to construct an identity, and the aim of this exercise is to improve the economic performance of the city. Academics and professionals, alarmed of the loss of authentic values, and the living society, alarmed at the deteriorating container quality of the city, caused by this Politics of the Past, are coming forward to prevent this disinheritance. New agencies created to materialise the rejuvenation of historic urban space, together with unprecedented changes in values, and social disharmony have turned the Politics of the Past in Vilnius into an instructive heritage discourse, which is further diversified by the involvement of local experts who are now taking charge of heritage protection.     

Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds

Historians of rural societies should consider using folklore sources in order to understand rural families in nineteenth-century France. A source like the stories collected from seventy-year-old Nannette Lévesque by the judge Victor Smith offers a very different viewpoint to depictions of such families by historians. Nannette was extremely poor, and spent her life moving between the mountain village where she was born in the Massif Central and the town of Saint-Étienne. Her stories call into question the reality of family “strategies” and the control of women by patriarchal authority, posited by some scholars of rural French family life.     

Imaginary Worlds,Real Stories

St Edmund, King and Martyr survived the Reformation as a hero and emblem of East Anglian regional identity. This article traces the development of the post-Reformation Edmund in ‘popular’ sources, including his continuing presence in the landscape and the influence of the nineteenth-century ‘cult of commemoration’ on perceptions of the saint.     

Forgetting the Past

Based on arguments developed more fully in the author's History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (2006), this article urges historians of women and gender to develop a richer appreciation of the distant past. The article uses data from recent conferences and journals to demonstrate that our field is now overly focused on the modern era, and especially the last century. Then, in the spirit of encouraging further discussion and debate, the article lays out some reasons for this contemporary tilt, some ways we might right the balance and some benefits of doing just that.