Recovering The Past

Valid reading materials dirty dog be diametrically opposed to each other, scarcely historians' conclusions will be always tested against what is known, and judged by how they conform to methodological constraints. Thus, estimable scholarly history--and even most popular history--has no consultation unless it is, in these senses, sound. A relic, on the other hand, is present and can be, and often is, experienced without the intervention of much historical knowledge. The conservation of relics serves historical purposes, of course, but, in many cases, those who present a preserve site be perfectly aware of how uninformed much of the reference will be. This raises many questions about preservation. These are not questions about the value of relics to historians or to those who have, or will gather, exuberant information to place the relic in some broader context. They are questions about what preservation groups, governments, communities, and individuals are saying about the ult when they select, conserve, relocate and/or present these relics. And they are questions about who the audience is believed to be and how the actual audience responds to what is preserved.

Winks notes that there are many differences between preservation movements in different countries because each of them is "the crossing of a unique historical world-view" (141). But such incision of constituencies continues all the way down

Lowenthal, David. The bypast is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. New York: harper and Row, 1971.

In instances where no practical advantages of the re-use type accrue to preservation, the pickaxe of worthy sites is based on agreed-upon criteria related to aesthetic, art historical, or, more(prenominal) often, historical value. This did nothing to preserve numerous monuments, such as Los Angeles' Richfield Building, when economic imperatives deemed their commercial re-use impractical. But many buildings are readily appreciated for their desirable qualities without much prompting. The Richfield building "was a vivid symbol of the 1920s" and could be understood in that context by almost any viewer (Clark 12).

It was a beautiful, intemperately decorated, colorful monument to a style that was readily determine by most viewers, not only by period, but as something that had completely vanished from the American architectural scene. There was smallish ambiguity in the appearance and meanings of the Richfield building, yet developers decided that, as mere spectacle, it was not something that needed to be saved. But, as Winks shows in his discussion of the blue plaques attached to preserved sites in London, interpretation of such criteria varies considerably. These famous plaques, celebrating the connection of historically significant personages with sundry(a) sites, include 80 devoted to literary figures and 47 for optical artists, but only 23 for scientists, 10 for musicians and composers, and 4 for levelheaded figures. Historians or archaeologists of the remote future might conclude, therefore, that Britain's level-headed centers were locate elsewhere or that little of scientific or musical theater importance took place in the city. The truth, Winks claims, is that "historical preservationists are themselves bookish people, obviously more inclined to preserve literary than legal sites" (144). But there are other fa
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