We had a wonderful – and very Lowenthal-style event (suggestive, fluid) – to celebrate the volume of essays about the life and work – and ideas – of the late David Lowenthal who died five years ago, but whose influence lives on through his books – most of all, The Past is a Foreign Country, published in 1985.

The question which was never answered was whether he was part of the Establishment or not. His father, Max Lowenthal, was a prominent Liberal lawyer in New York and Washington. David went to Harvard and was a GI, working during the war for the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. Then, he studied geography at Berkeley, California and got interested in the ecology and sociology of the Caribbean, which he studied in depth under the auspices of Philip Mason at the Institute of Race Relations. He was hired by Noel Annan to be a Professor of Geography at University College, but took early retirement in 1985, which gave him freedom to write critically, but empathetically, about issues of heritage: the interpretation of the past through books, films and historic sites.

He was so broad-ranging that he is impossible to pin down: a critic of heritage, but deeply interested in all aspects of the past and how it is interpreted. Actually, not part of the Establishment, because so intependent-minded and such a deeply intellectually self-reflective liberal.

https://www.pagesofhackney.co.uk/webshop/product/david-lowenthals-archipelagic-and-transatlantic-landscapes-his-public-and-scholarly-heritage/