Nineteenth-century France grew fascinated with the local past. Thousands of citizens embraced local archaeology, penned historical vignettes and monographs, staged historical pageants, and created museums and pantheons of celebrities. Stéphane Gerson's rich, elegantly written, and timely book provides the first cultural and political history of what contemporaries called the "cult of local memories," an unprecedented effort to resuscitate the past, instill affection for one's locality, and hence create a sense of place. A wide range of archival and printed sources (some of them untapped until now) inform the author's engaging portrait of a little-known realm of Parisian entrepreneurs and middling provincials, of obscure historians and intellectual luminaries. Arguing that the "local" and modernity were interlaced, rather than inimical, between the 1820s and 1890s, Gerson explores the diverse uses of local memories in modern France—from their theatricality and commercialization to their political and pedagogical applications. The Pride of Place shows that, contrary to our received ideas about French nationhood and centralism, the "local" buttressed the nation while seducing Parisian and local officials. The state cautiously supported the cult of local memories even as it sought to co-opt them and grappled with their cultural and political implications. The current enthusiasm for local memories, Gerson thus finds, is neither new nor a threat to Republican unity. More broadly yet, this book illuminates the predicament of countries that, like France, are now caught between supranational forces and a revival of local sentiments.
Nineteenth-century France grew fascinated with the local past. Thousands of citizens embraced local archaeology, penned historical vignettes and monographs, staged historical pageants, and created museums and pantheons of celebrities. Stéphane Gerson's rich, elegantly written, and timely book provides the first cultural and political history of what contemporaries called the "cult of local memories," an unprecedented effort to resuscitate the past, instill affection for one's locality, and hence create a sense of place. A wide range of archival and printed sources (some of them untapped until now) inform the author's engaging portrait of a little-known realm of Parisian entrepreneurs and middling provincials, of obscure historians and intellectual luminaries. Arguing that the "local" and modernity were interlaced, rather than inimical, between the 1820s and 1890s, Gerson explores the diverse uses of local memories in modern France—from their theatricality and commercialization to their political and pedagogical applications. The Pride of Place shows that, contrary to our received ideas about French nationhood and centralism, the "local" buttressed the nation while seducing Parisian and local officials. The state cautiously supported the cult of local memories even as it sought to co-opt them and grappled with their cultural and political implications. The current enthusiasm for local memories, Gerson thus finds, is neither new nor a threat to Republican unity. More broadly yet, this book illuminates the predicament of countries that, like France, are now caught between supranational forces and a revival of local sentiments.
It is in the intellectual context of the new possibility of philosophy, and the great new challenge facing philosophy, that I place Stéphane Beaulac’s important book. His work takes advantage, in particular, of several of the hard-earned lessons of twentieth-century philosophy and social experience. From the Foreword.
Two simple but profound questions have preoccupied scholars since the establishment of history education over a century ago: what is historical thinking, and how do educators go about teaching it? In Thinking Historically, Stéphane Ltévesque examines these questions, focusing on what it means to think critically about the past. As students engage in a new century already characterized by global instability, uncertainty, and rivalry over claims about the past, present, and future, this study revisits enduring questions and aims to offer new and relevant answers. Drawing on a rich collection of personal, national, and international studies in history education, Ltévesque offers a coherent and innovative way of looking at how historical expertise in the domain intersects with the 'pedagogy of history education.' Thinking Historically provides teacher educators, and all those working in the field of history education, ways of rethinking their practice by presenting some of the benchmarks, in terms of procedural concepts, of what students ought to learn and do to become more critical historical actors and citizens. As questions regarding history education compel educators with greater force than ever, this study explores different ways of approaching and engaging with the discipline in the twenty-first century.
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