Today’s libraries and museums are heavily indebted to the passions and obsessions of numerous individual collectors who devoted their lives to amassing collections of books, manuscripts, artworks, and other culturally significant objects. Collecting the Past brings together the latest research on a wide range of significant British collectors from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, including Hans Sloane, Sarah Sophia Banks, Thomas Phillipps, Sydney Cockerell, J. P. Morgan Jr., Alfred Chester Beatty and R. E. Hart. Contributors to the volume examine the phenomenon of collecting in a variety of settings and across a range of different materials. Considering the aims and motives that led these collectors to assemble such remarkable collections, the book also examines the history of these collections after the collector’s death. Particular attention is given to the often complicated relationship between collectors and the public institutions that subsequently came to house their collections. Situated within the framework of cultural collecting more generally, this book offers an authoritative series of essays on key collectors. Collecting the Past should be most interesting to researchers, academics and postgraduate students engaged in the study of museum studies, book history, manuscript studies, museum history, library history and the history of collecting. Professionals in libraries, museums and galleries will also find the volume of great interest.

Offers a broad and vivid overview of the culture of collecting in France over the long nineteenth-century.

Many history museums collect contemporary objects, stories, images and sounds. But reasoned collecting strategies and policies are often lacking. The sheer quantity of available material culture and the complexity of contemporary life leave many confused about how best to document and engage with the present. Collecting the Contemporaryaddresses one of the most fundamental issues facing today's history museums: why and how to engage with contemporary collecting? In a format which is approachable, attractive - and above all actionable, this handbook is packed with stimulating thinking and international case studies from some of the leading practitioners and thinkers in the field. This overview of contemporary collecting in a social historical context is well overdue. Original source material, ideas, developments and research have never before been brought together in a single volume.

Today’s libraries and museums are heavily indebted to the passions and obsessions of numerous individual collectors who devoted their lives to amassing collections of books, manuscripts, artworks, and other culturally significant objects. Collecting the Past brings together the latest research on a wide range of significant British collectors from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, including Hans Sloane, Sarah Sophia Banks, Thomas Phillipps, Sydney Cockerell, J. P. Morgan Jr., Alfred Chester Beatty and R. E. Hart. Contributors to the volume examine the phenomenon of collecting in a variety of settings and across a range of different materials. Considering the aims and motives that led these collectors to assemble such remarkable collections, the book also examines the history of these collections after the collector’s death. Particular attention is given to the often complicated relationship between collectors and the public institutions that subsequently came to house their collections. Situated within the framework of cultural collecting more generally, this book offers an authoritative series of essays on key collectors. Collecting the Past should be most interesting to researchers, academics and postgraduate students engaged in the study of museum studies, book history, manuscript studies, museum history, library history and the history of collecting. Professionals in libraries, museums and galleries will also find the volume of great interest.

This volume addresses the representation of history and collective memory in Latin American literature. The book presents a variety of novel perspectives on the subject, linked by the common themes of the subjectivity of time and history, literature used as a political tool and the representation of marginalized groups. The collection takes an original approach to viewing national histories as represented in literature by adopting a cross-disciplinary position. While there are other publications addressing some of the issues raised in this collection, this book goes beyond literary representations of history. The essays collected here examine technological, political and social developments as a means of creating, re-structuring and (in some cases) potentially destroying nations.

This collection explores the role of memoria histórica in its broadest sense, bringing together studies of narrative, theatre, visual expressions, film, television, and radio that provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary cultural production in Spain in this regard. Employing a wide range of critical approaches to works that examine, comment on, and recreate events and epochs from the civil war to the present, the essays gathered here bring together research and intercultural memory to investigate half a century of cultural production, ranging from “high culture” to more popular productions, such as television series and graphic novels. A testament to the conflation of multiple silencings – be they of the defeated, victims of trauma or women – this project is about hearing the voices of the unheard and recovering their muted past.

The study of provenance—the history of the creation and ownership of an artefact, work of art, or specimen—provides insights into the history of taste and collecting, illuminating the social, economic, and historic trends in which an object was created and collected. It is as much a history of people as it is of objects, and its study often reveals intricate networks of relationships, patterns of activity and motivations. This book promotes the study of the history of collecting and collections in all their variety through the lens of provenance, and explores the subject as a cross-disciplinary activity. Perhaps for the first time in a publication, it draws on expertise ranging from art history and anthropology, to natural history and law, looking at periods from antiquity through the 18th century and the Holocaust era to the present, and materials from Europe and the Americas to China and the Pacific. The issues raised are wide-ranging, touching on aspects of authenticity, cultural meaning and material transformation and economic and commercial drivers, as well as collector and object biography. The book fills a gap in the study of collecting and provenance, taking the subject holistically and from multiple standpoints, better to reflect the widening interest in provenance from a range of disciplinary perspectives. This book will be a service to the field, from established scholars and museum professionals to students of collecting history, cultural heritage, and museum studies.