Our Past Before Us
Gerrard Roots examines two books on the significance of the past and pastoral life.
- Our Past Before Us: Why Do We Save It?
edited by David Lowenthal and Marcus Binney. 263 pp. (Temple Smith, 1982) - Peasants And Countrymen In Literature
edited by Kathleen Parkinson and Martin Priestman. 210 pp. (Roehampton Institute of Higher Education, 1982)
In the 1980s we should be better able to interpret and preserve our past than were our predecessors: we have more information, we have a multiplicity of historical methods, we have the benefit of the techniques of other disciplines which bear upon history and we apparently have the support of the state in our efforts to preserve what remains of our heritage. Yet any self-congratulation would be unjustified. Despite our apparent advantages we seem still to be as incapable of learning from, as opposed to simply learning, history as our forebears: the horrors of the 1930s are re-enacted in our economy, gun-boat diplomacy is revived on a Lilliputian scale in the South Atlantic, the squalor of our inner cities mirrors the miseries of urban non-planning in the nineteenth century.
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