Sense of History: The Place of the Past in the American Life

How is the past used? Who writes our history and what political ends do they try to accomplish by advocating one version of the American past rather than another? These are old questions, and University of Massachusetts at Amherst historian Glassberg provides tedious and predictable answers. He devotes an entire chapter, for example, to persuading readers of the obvious that war memorials may tell us more about the eras in which they were built than the wars they commemorate. In another essay, he explains how rituals in America's industrialized cities, like San Francisco's 1909 Portol Festival, promoted the idea that the heterogeneous, polyglot immigrant populations of urban landscapes were one people. Glassberg also discusses Ken Burns's Civil War miniseries, noting that leading historians were dissatisfied with Burns's portrayal of African-Americans. The topic is interesting, but Glassberg's treatment adds little to Ken Burns's the Civil War: Historians Respond, edited by Robert Brent Toplin. Glassberg's discourse on New England towns is desultory and not obviously related to his overarching thesis about the construction of historical memory. Not that this is a book totally bereft of insight: in a prosaic chapter about the construction of historical meaning in California, Glassberg does make the fresh point that Californians, in their embrace of redwoods and sequoias, ""named, labeled, and displayed"" their trees ""like historical relics."" But the occasional thoughtful paragraph cannot rescue this book from its banality. (Apr.)