Imagining The Past
Download and Read Imagining The Past full books in PDF, ePUB, and Kindle. Read online free Imagining The Past ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Imagining the Past
Author | : |
Publisher | : University of Georgia Press |
Total Pages | : 321 |
Release | : 1996-02-01 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 0820318108 |
Download Imagining the Past Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle
How we make history--and what we then make of it--is engagingly dramatized in T. H. Breen's portrait of a 350-year-old American community faced with the costs of its “progress.” In the particulars of one town's struggle to check development and save its natural environment, Breen shows how our sense of history reflects our ever-changing self-perceptions and hopes for the future. Breen first went to East Hampton, the celebrated Long Island resort town, to write about the Mulford Farmstead, a picturesque saltbox dating from the 1680s. Through his research, he came across a fascinating cast of local characters, past and present, who contributed to, invented, and reinvented the town's history. Breen's work also drew him into contemporary local affairs: factionalism among residents, zoning disputes, and debates over resource management. Driving these heated issues, Breen found, were some dearly held notions about a harmonious, agrarian past that conflicted with what he had come to know about the divisiveness and opportunism of East Hampton's early days. Imagining the Past is about the interplay between some of the East Hampton histories Breen encountered: the “official” histories of many generations, the myths and oral traditions, and the curious stories that Breen, as an outsider, discerned in the town's rich holdings of artifacts and documents. With a warm yet wry regard for human nature, Breen obliges us to confront our pasts in all their complexities and ironies, no matter how unsettling or inconvenient the experience.
Imagining the Past Related Books
Pages: 321
Pages: 387
Pages: 225
Pages: 360
Pages: 284