This fascinating look at Canada’s living history museums – pioneer villages and old forts where actors recreate the past – shows how they reveal as much about Canadian post-war interests as they do about settler history.
Introduction: Living History Time Machines
Part 1: Foundations
1 History on Display
2 The Foundations of Living History in Canada
3 Tourism and History
Part 2: Structures
4 Pioneer Days
5 A Sense of the Past
6 Louisbourg and the Quest for Authenticity
Part 3: Connections
7 Fur and Gold
8 The Great Tradition of Western Empire
9 The Spirit of B & B
10 People and Place
11 Genuine Indians
Conclusion: The Limits of Time Travel
Notes
Index
Alan Gordon is a professor of history at the University of Guelph. He has written extensively about memory, commemoration, and the uses of history.
Gordon’s research is meticulous and his writing exceptionally
coherent. Time Travel is an excellent study of how priorities and
preoccupations guide historical interpretation, and an important
addition to the study of Canada’s heritage industry.
*Canadian Literature, 236*
... Gordon pulls together a staggering amount of materials to
provide a compelling glimpse into the history of living history. He
illustrates the contradictions that abound—the tensions between
scholarship and entertainment; between National and multicultural
remembrance; between the colliding narratives of settler and
Indigenous histories. There is more to be written on this story,
and Gordon has made a significant contribution to this area of
historical scholarship. Time Travel is a useful roadmap
that scholars might utilize to explore the fascinating
contradictions and interplay between narrative, history and
authenticity, so exemplified in the living history
museum.
*BC Studies*
As a comprehensive history of public history in Canada, Time Travel
is a welcome text. … Time Travel does a wonderful job of
connecting experiments in living history with that national
past.
*Historical Studies in Education*
Time Travel is an important book that provides keen insights in the
understanding of the emergence of living history museums in
mid-twentieth century Canada… In a masterful way, Gordon guides the
reader through some of the intellectual debates that shaped the
making of the living history museum movement.
*Great Plains Quarterly 38.4*
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