| Description |
xvi, 277 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm |
| Contents |
I. The Personal and the Professional. 1. Personal Identity and the Historian's Vocation -- II. Perceptions of Culture and Public Life. 2. Culture and the State in America. 3. Temples of Justice: The Iconography of Judgment and American Culture. 4. "Our Idealism Is Practical": Emerging Uses of Tradition in American Commercial Culture, 1889-1936. 5. The Enduring Challenges and Changing Role of Cultural Institutions -- III. Changing Perceptions of the Past. 6. Myth, Memory, and Amnesia in American Historical Art. 7. The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration. 8. Some Patterns and Meanings of Memory Distortion in American History. 9. History Is Our Heritage: The Past in Contemporary American Culture |
| Summary |
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his People of Paradox (1973), and the Francis Parkman Prize for A Machine That Would Go of Itself (1987), Michael Kammen is widely regarded as one of our most important, and most diversely talented, cultural historians. David Brion Davis has said of him that "no other historian of Michael's generation has such a broad and concrete grasp 'American culture' in all its manifestions from constitutional law to formal painting and popular culture." Now, In the Past Lane brings together writings from more than a decade, covering the broad spectrum of Kammen's recent interests, including the social role of the historian, the relationship between culture and the State, uses of tradition in American commercial culture, American historical art, memory distortion in American history, the contested uses of history in American education, and much more |
| Notes |
Includes index |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages [227]-266) and index |
| Subject |
Popular culture -- United States -- Historiography.
|
|
Memory -- Social aspects -- United States -- History.
|
| SUBJECT |
United States -- Social life and customs http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140527 -- Historiography.
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh00006046
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| LC no. |
97021613 |
| ISBN |
0195111117 acid-free paper |
|
