We live in a world of dinosaurs and cavemen, of barons and peasants; our cities include Babylon and Rome, and our moral codes extend from the Victorian to the lawless Wild West. Or rather, as Ross Wilson demonstrates in this fascinating study, we lament that we do so, for metaphors and allusions to history constantly bubble through public life as ... Read morea primary mode of condemning unwanted aspects of the present. This practice embodies the utopian conceit at the heart of modernity
that the present stands utterly divorced from the past. But it also allows history to creep back in, for it furnishes a language of criticism.
Nicholas Popper, Associate Professor of History, The College of William and Mary, USA
In The Language of the Past Ross Wilson offers a wide-ranging survey of the multiple ways in which people in Britain and the United States since the eighteenth century have spoken about various past times – ancient, medieval and early modern – as a form of self-reflection about the nature of modern society and as a means of differentiating the present from past. Focusing on popular rather than academic discourse, he argues that it is this “language of the past” which functions to create a “double-consciousness” of past and present that marks the advent of the modern age as an era of progress. The book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the ways in which perceptions of the past serve to establish and maintain contemporary identities and, ultimately, generate a vision of the future.
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Krieger–Eisenhower Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University, USA
…A powerful, conceptually well-informed and significant study. . . The author establishes a model for a persuasive study of the relationship between understandings of the past, and its claimed significance for the present. The chapters expose the subtle linguistic battlefields over the usage of words by politicians, commentators and the media to frame and valorise acts of historical commemoration, heritage, and persisting values. . . Importantly a case is made for establishing how the vocabulary and associated historical assumptions continue to underpin contested conceptions of modernity. This [book] ought to be very profitably read by academic historians, undergraduates, especially politicians, and the wider public. It again establishes how important conceptions of the past (and getting them right) is an urgent issue for our contemporary world.
Justin Champion, President of the Historical Association and Professor of the Early Modern History of Ideas, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
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