In the Past Lane

Michael Kammen is the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture at Cornell University. He won the Pulitzer Prize for People of Paradox (1973) and the Francis Parkman Prize for A Machine That Would Go of Itself (1987). Kammen is also the author of The Lively Arts (Oxford, 1996).

• I. The Personal and the Professional1: Personal Identity and the Historian's VocationII. Perceptions of Culture and Public Life2: Culture and the State of America3: Temples of Justice: The Iconography of Judgement and American Culture4: "Our Idealism is Practical": Emerging Uses of Tradition in American Commercial Culture, 1889-19365: The Enduring Challenges and Changing Role of Cultural InstitutionsIII. Changing Perceptions of the Past6: Myth, Memory, and Amnesia in American Historical Art7: The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration8: Some Patterns and Meanings of Memory Distortion in American History9: History Is Our Heritage: The Past in Contemporary American Culture

In this book, Professor Kammen addresses three specific current concerns among American historians: the nature and dynamics of collective memory in national life, the contested role of cultural programs in the civic order, and the complex linking between the personal and the professional in the writing of history. More deeply, it is a book about art-about representations of reality by artists in the form of words and in the form of objects. Michael Kammen is passionate about art in both of these forms. He appreciates the primal fact that America is most usefully seen as one culture among the myriad cultures of the earth. His work as a scholar is powered by a passion for context: cultural context, the context of personal experience, all past time, and global geography. Widely aware, carefully thought-out, superbly written, In The Past Lane offers us here insights and understandings that are uniquely valuable. Joel Williamson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill