Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories.

Abstract

How we make history--and what we then make of it--is engagingly dramatized in T. H. Breen's portrait of a 350-year-old American community faced with costs of its progress. In particulars of one town's struggle to check development and save its natural environment, Breen shows how our sense of history reflects our ever-changing self-perceptions and hopes for future.Breen first went to East Hampton, celebrated Long Island resort town, to write about Mulford Farmstead, a picturesque saltbox dating from 1680s. Through his research, he came across a fascinating cast of local characters, past and present, who contributed to, invented, and reinvented town's history. Breen's work also drew him into contemporary local affairs: factionalism among residents, zoning disputes, and debates over resource management. Driving these heated issues, Breen found, were some dearly held notions about a harmonious, agrarian past that conflicted with what he had come to know about divisiveness and opportunism of East Hampton's early days.Imagining Past is about interplay between some of East Hampton histories Breen encountered: official histories of many generations, myths and oral traditions, and curious stories that Breen, as an outsider, discerned in town's rich holdings of artifacts and documents. With a warm yet wry regard for human nature, Breen obliges us to confront our pasts in all the