Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (review)

This collection of essays by David Glassberg provides an interesting, thoughtful, and highly readable selection of public history case studies that will be equally useful to folklorists working in the public sector or in the classroom. Organizing his work under the interdisciplinary rubric of "memory studies," Glassberg takes us on a journey through his own research as both academic and public historian. Through these essays, he addresses issues of current and ongoing significance for all who work with living cultures or train future workers: specifically, the processes by which people remember and use the past and how a better understanding of these processes can inform the work of folklorists.

The unifying theme of the book is the "sense of history," which Glassberg defines as "akin to what environmental psychologists describe as sense of place—not quite territoriality, as among other animals, but a sense of locatedness and belonging" (p. 7). This sense of history locates people spatially, temporally, and communally and is at work in all levels of historical remembering from the autobiographical to the public. He goes on to provide an accessible, succinct summary of the scholarship on memory, an area of research that examines how people create, debate, use, understand, and reshape the past over time. He identifies politics, popular culture, and place as three interpretive foci to be found across disciplines in the literature addressing the "sense of history" and organizes his essays as illustrations of these three approaches.

Glassberg identifies two competing approaches to the politics of memory: one that focuses on the shared historical myths and symbols bringing diverse groups together in an "imagined community" and another that looks at the uses of history in struggles between competing social groups. In his chapters on a local memorial to World War I veterans in Orange, Massachusetts, and the urban "Portolá Festival" in early twentieth-century San Francisco, Glassberg skillfully balances these two approaches, producing a nuanced view of the political forces at work in memorialization and civic celebration.

Glassberg notes that there is much research to be done on the question of how people actually receive and respond to the history being presented to them. In his chapter on Ken Burns's documentary epic, The Civil War, he analyzes the letters that Burns received from the public after it appeared on public television. This approach moves beyond the public debates between Burns and professional historians to explore how people contextualize historical representations by means of their own experiences and interpretations of the past.

In his exploration of place as both the physical and subjective site of memory, Glassberg addresses the issue of "placelessness" that some scholars claim is a peculiarly American affliction springing from geographic mobility and the homogenizing influence of mass culture on once-unique local spaces. He dismisses some of these charges as "merely intellectuals' nostalgia for past agricultural communities and ethnic neighborhoods"(p. 20). His discussion of "place-making" moves beyond the notion of American placelessness to examine how migration, attachment to place, and sense of history shaped the image of New England town character and the emergence of historical sites in California between 1850 and 1940.

This fascinating collection of essays illustrates how historians and other researchers of culture and tradition can contribute to the continuing enterprise of making the past, its interpreters, and its uses more intelligible, more humane, and more enlightened.