1 David Lowenthal An Appreciation richard longstreth David Lowenthal (1923–2018) was more than sixty years old when The Past Is a Foreign Country, his most ambitious and widely acclaimed book to date, was published in 1985 (Lowenthal 2015). For many scholars this volume would be a fitting capstone to a distinguished career, but for Lowenthal it came during a new and very consequential period in his pursuit of analyzing human culture. Since then, his impact has continued to be significant in a number of fields, and his passing has been mourned by scholars in American studies, anthropology, archaeology, art and architectural history, cultural and social history, environmental history, geography, and museum studies, among other realms. That sense of loss is no more acutely felt than in the field of historic preservation. In the United States, at least, preservationists have been notoriously nonintrospective . Critiques have mainly emanated from outsiders. Historical accounts have been modestly growing in number, yet many studies are more documentary than analytical, and much fertile ground remains unexplored. Even the motivating factors that have propelled preservation from a relatively localized antiquarian pursuit into a major force in the reshaping of numerous communities, large and small, have not been examined in adequate depth. Avoiding introspection can in part be explained by the fact that during the second half of the twentieth century preservation did indeed reinvent itself. The new business of preservation has been activist-oriented and necessarily preoccupied with effecting fundamental changes in how we address the built environment. Under the circum stances, there has been no time for self-examination, especially no time for addressing ambiguities, let alone shortcomings. Like many novel endeavors , preservation has focused on getting concrete things done, not on intellectual exploration. Many scholars , especially architectural historians, supported preservation efforts but did not focus on them in their research. Some geographers dismissed the effort as intellectually flaccid. And, even though preservation was emerging as a decisive factor in the urban landscape, UMP067_Preservation_ff.indd 1 12/18/19 3:23 PM 2 Preservation Education & Research v o l u m e 1 1| 2 0 1 9 just as conservation was in the natural landscape, most urban historians just ignored the phenomenon. The dearth of critical inquiry makes Lowenthal’s work all the more significant . He was among the first scholars of high repute to understand how important preservation had become as a cultural phenomenon. Moreover, he framed his subject not as a wholly new occurrence, but as one with deep roots in Western thinking. He was remarkably broad in the kinds of sources—popular as well as elite—he mined for his analysis. From centuriesold treatises to contemporary advertising copy, ruins to replicas, psychoanalysis to science fiction—the material he marshaled to formulate his arguments is astounding by any standard. His essays and books that examine attitudes toward the past are far more than critiques ; they are profound explorations of the human outlook and demonstrate how important the preservation enterprise , warts and all, really is in contemporary society. Not since John Ruskin has anyone matched Lowenthal’s prolific explorations of how the physical past has left its imprint on our culture. In 1983 Lowenthal offered as compelling and succinct a rationale for historic preservation as one could hope to attain: “We need the familiar; without reminders of the past we could not function in the present. Our structures and artifacts affirm our sense of identity through continuity with forebears, enrich our life by making memory and history vivid, and provide a desirable contrast with, if not refuge from, the new” (Lowenthal 1983, 229). Even more to the point: “A past lacking tangible relics seems too tenuous to be credible ” (Lowenthal 2015, 392). At the same time, our relationship with the past is filled with ambiguities, even contradictions . In an early salvo of the ideas he would investigate in detail in The Past Is a Foreign Country, he asserted that “the American past is not permitted to coexist with the present. It is always in quotation marks and fancy dress . . . an isolated object of reverence and pleasure . . . detached, remote, and essentially lifeless” (Lowenthal 1966, 31). More than most scholars, Lowenthal’s sensibilities were shaped...