In the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on 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.