Who owns History ?
Over the past few months, I made what you could call a farewell tour, except I wasn’t the one going away. What I did was set out to bid goodbye to a few favorite works of art that would soon be departing the U.S. for good. First I headed to California and the Getty Villa in Malibu, a museum devoted to the ancient Greeks, Etruscans and Romans. I wanted a long last look at its statue of a goddess from the 5th century B.C. Scholars are divided over just which goddess she represents, but whoever she is, at 7.5 ft. (2.3 m) tall, she’s a formidable woman, one of the most powerful works in the Getty’s rich collection. Or she was. Two years ago, Francesco Rutelli, newly appointed as Italy’s Culture Minister, embarked on a campaign to demand the return of dozens of objects held by U.S. museums, ancient works that he said had been looted from archaeological digs in his country and smuggled out.
Eric Foner of Columbia University is one of our nation’s most acclaimed historians. A past president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, he is best known as the author of pioneering revisionist studies of Reconstruction and of Republican ideology before the Civil War, as well as other books on ideology and politics in the Civil War era. He is also one of the foremost exponents of what has become known as “radical history”: the euphemism of choice for Marxist and neo-Marxist historians who seek to overturn the old mainstream political history. Indeed, so devoted is Foner to this aim that he even criticizes his first book, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970) — a solid work of scholarship and history that justly gave him a major reputation — as “a curiously old- fashioned book” because it lacked the orientation of the so-called “new histories.
The willy-nilly art of preserving local landmarks By Joy Lanzendorfer For years, the Carrillo Adobe has quietly sat under its metal roof across from Montgomery Village in Santa Rosa. The San Josebased developer Barry Swenson Builder is hoping to construct 120 townhouses on the lot, and now the site is the center of contention between developers and environmental–oh, wait. That’s not right. Let’s do it again. Now the site is the center of contention between developers and historians. As the sign near it says, the Carrillo Adobe is where Santa Rosa began. Maria Carrillo, mother-in-law of General Vallejo, built the house in 1837. It may have been converted from an even older building, a satellite chapel for the Catholic Mission in Sonoma. The existence of an older chapel makes sense because that area was probably a village for the Pomo Indians, who lived and worked along the banks of the Santa Rosa Creek.
He reconsiders his own earlier ideas and those of the pathbreaking Richard Hofstadter. He also examines international changes during the past two decades–globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa–and their effects on historical consciousness. He concludes with considerations of the enduring, but often misunderstood, legacies of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. This is a provocative, even controversial, study of the reasons we care about history–or should.
