Past Into Present

Past Into Present
Author: Stacy Flora Roth
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807847107

First-person interpretation_the portrayal of historical characters through interactive dramatization or roleplaying_is an effective, albeit controversial, method used to bring history to life at museums, historic sites, and other public venues. Stacy Roth

Unsettled History

Unsettled History
Author: Leslie Witz
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2017-02-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 047212255X

Unsettled History examines South African society and the construction and presentation of its public pasts, from Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 to South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup ®. Conventionally represented as a time of rectifying the silences and distortions of settler history through inclusion and recovery, the focus here instead is on the shifts in processes and locations of historicizing and the unsettled state of categories of framing history in post-apartheid South Africa. This era saw fundamental transformations in the order of knowledge: from the academy to the public; from popular history to public history; from history-as-lesson to history-as-forum. Leslie Witz, Gary Minkley, and Ciraj Rassool take the reader to sites of historical production in which complex ideas about pasts are invoked, and navigate a path toward understanding the agencies of image-making and memory production. This volume is the outcome of the authors’ intensive collaborative research and engagement over twenty-five years on questions including the production and performance of apartheid history; the cultural politics of social history; South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and practices of orality; tourism as an arena of image-making and historical construction; museums as sites of heritage production for a new South Africa; photographs, archival meanings, and the construction of the social documentary; and the centenary commemorations of the South African War and the making of race. The authors not only witnessed many of these instances of history-making but were also participants in their constitution.

Brazil's Living Museum

Brazil's Living Museum
Author: Anadelia A. Romo
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2010-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807895946

Brazil's northeastern state of Bahia has built its economy around attracting international tourists to what is billed as the locus of Afro-Brazilian culture and the epicenter of Brazilian racial harmony. Yet this inclusive ideal has a complicated past. Chronicling the discourse among intellectuals and state officials during the period from the abolition of slavery in 1888 to the start of Brazil's military regime in 1964, Anadelia Romo uncovers how the state's nonwhite majority moved from being a source of embarrassment to being a critical component of Bahia's identity. Romo examines ideas of race in key cultural and public arenas through a close analysis of medical science, the arts, education, and the social sciences. As she argues, although Bahian racial thought came to embrace elements of Afro-Brazilian culture, the presentation of Bahia as a "living museum" threatened by social change portrayed Afro-Bahian culture and modernity as necessarily at odds. Romo's finely tuned account complicates our understanding of Brazilian racial ideology and enriches our knowledge of the constructions of race across Latin America and the larger African diaspora.

Living History Museums

Living History Museums
Author: Scott Magelssen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2007
Genre: Historic sites
ISBN: 0810858657

Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance examines the performance techniques of Living History Museums, cultural institutions that merge historical exhibits with costumed live performance. Institutions such as Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg are analyzed from a theatrical perspective, offering a new genealogy of living museum performance.

The National Parks

The National Parks
Author: Barry Mackintosh
Publisher:
Total Pages: 116
Release: 1985
Genre: National parks and reserves
ISBN: