Liz's history and heritage stuff

November 16

“ Benedict Anderson suggests that nations are ‘imagined communities’. Heritage is one of a series of tools used by the nation-state to emphasise a shared national identity. It is thus considered a key part of nation building. It is paradoxically the relative ‘newness’ of nations which means that they must appeal to a strong sense of tradition and heritage to form a sense of collective past among their members.
But note that to be successful in building a nation requires the exclusion of non-conforming groups and other ‘nations’ that might also lay claim to the state under question.
It is in this regard that the role of heritage in nation building can be seen to be contentious and the source of unequal power relationships. AD281-09J: Study Guide: Week 7: 1 Course book

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History and heritage tweets 'curated' by Liz

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Planning proposals for heritage buildings to be re-written after outcry - Telegraph

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“ Perhaps the most sophisticated attempt to locate the complex mix of developments which went under the name of heritage came from the French historian Pierre Nora. In an ambitious project, Nora and a host of historians under his command set out to chart the history of memory in the modern French nation. In coming to his own, contemporary, period Nora found public memory colonized by what he termed les lieux de memoire – the realms or places of memory (Nora, 1984–93). Contrary to appearances, these realms of memory, far from allowing access to the historical past, obstructed historical thought: rather like heritage in the Anglophone literature, in the lC20, for Nora, les lieux de memoire promised much but delivered little, alluding to a past that could never be grasped, known, or experienced. In a contrary conceptual move, the English historian Raphael Samuel, tired of intellectuals exhibiting a characteristic snobbishness about the popular pleasures organized by the heritage industries, embarked upon an ambitious study in which he determined to demonstrate that heritage, far from being destructive of historical consciousness, worked as a great impetus for the arrival of a new form of historical knowledge. These controversies currently underwrite the entire governance or administration of the-past-in-the-present – be it among museum curators, or in the decisions to designate world heritage sites, or in local struggles to preserve a neighborhood artifact. From : Heritage in Bennett, T., Grossberg, L. and Morris, M. (eds) (2005) New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Malden, MA and Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, pp. 154–6.

November 14

BBC NEWS | England | Museum 'wants hoard in Midlands'

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Protecting our nation's war memorials - Corporate - Communities and Local Government

November 13

The Heritage Bill parliamentary discussion TUESDAY 20 OCTOBER 2009

Talking about the proposed Heritage Bill

“do not foresee any Heritage Bill being produced in the House this side of the general election”