History in its Natural Environment

As public historians, we aim to connect the public to history using methods that are relevant and accessible in the public realm. We must balance our academic desire for historical accuracy with the public’s interest in heritage and the popular power of nostalgia. In class, we have often discussed the popularity (and pitfalls) of “living history” and the public desire to interact with the past. Landscapes offer a unique and somewhat literal version of “living history,” because they can represent natural, cultural, and material history. As the Glassberg article says, “Landscape is history made visible.” Whether viewing the Grand Canyon or the site of JFK’s assassination, landscapes allow people to “see” the past through knowing they are in a place of historical significance.

The public’s interest in history is frequently driven by the urge to know “what it was really like.” Driven by nostalgia (often second-hand), people want an experience with places and events significant in history; to physically be in a place where something important happened. This desire has fueled the historical tourism industry and has led to the mass popularity of sites such as Colonial Williamsburg. It has also encouraged droves of tourists to visit battlefields, assassination sites, and the homes of important people. Much like our contemporary obsession with celebrities and tabloids, people want to know what life is/was really like in other times, situations, and places. Landscapes allow us to vividly imagine this and therefore produce a unique connection to the past.

How humans have interacted with the natural landscape represents our cultural and practical past; things of beauty and status or things of function. We leave permanent structures when something is important enough to remember. Monuments, cemeteries, castles, railroads; all of these things tell us something about the human past. How we have perceived the environment around us and given it meaning offers insight into the past, and often determines how a particular environment will be used in the future. As much as we like change, we don’t like our change to deviate too much from what has been done before. We are all for all those new condos going up in downtown Toronto, but utterly against the ones that are proposed in cottage country. Humans react very strongly to their surroundings and are very easily offended by attempts to alter a place’s natural state, whether real or imagined.

Whether we intend to or not, we have already classified our environment to serve specific purposes. We want to live in our constructed worlds, but have an innate desire to observe a world without us, as if this is a whole new dimension of “seeing” history. We are dedicated to preservation and conservation, as exemplified by the various National Parks in Canada and the US. These systems came about (not coincidentally) when modern progress and change was first appearing on the North American scene. By preserving nature in its “pure, untouched by man” state, we reveal several key characteristics of our culture and society; the depth of respect we have for our environment and landscapes; the belief that preservation and conservation will redeem us of our past offences against it; our desire to maintain a constant in a rapidly changing environment; our continued idealization of nature as a place of refuge and purity; and the comfort we find in knowing that there is something greater and more powerful in the world than we are.