An eclectic collection of essays on creative use, manipulation, and "invention" of traditions by groups of many sizes and types: ethnic, regional, religious, organizational, and national.

Usable Pasts addresses projects dating to two periods in the United States that saw increased financial support from the state for socially engaged culture. By analysing artworks dating to the 1990s by Suzanne Lacy, Rick Lowe and Martha Rosler in relation to experimental theatre, modern dance, and photography produced within the leftist Cultural Front of the 1930s, this book unpicks the mythic and material afterlives of the New Deal in American cultural politics in order to write a new history of social practice art in the United States. From teenage mothers organising exhibitions that challenged welfare reform, to communist dance troupes choreographing their struggles as domestic workers, Usable Pasts addresses the aesthetics and politics of these attempts to transform society through art in relation to questions of state formation.

In this volume, scholars of history, archaeology and anthropology explore the located and contextual nature of historical narratives, analysing contested historical rituals, building style, and traditions, .

Moeller conveys the complicated story of how West Germans recast the past after the Second World War. He demonstrates the 'selective remembering' that took place among West Germans during the postwar years: in particular, they remembered crimes committed against Germans.

Produced and circulated outside the elite sphere of fine art, folk art appealed to the middle-class Americans who were eager to express their identities, interests, and social ambitions through these decorative, vernacular objects. This catalogue presents new research on the Colby College Museum of Art's important collection of paintings, sculptures, needleworks, and works on paper by self-trained artists working primarily in the eastern part of the United States during the long nineteenth century. Essays by Seth A. Thayer, Jr., and Elizabeth Finch investigate the formation, evolving interpretation, and intended uses of the American Heritage Collection of Edith Kemper Jetté and Ellerton Marcel Jetté - one of the earliest gifts to enter the Colby Museum and the basis of its folk art collection. A third essay by Tanya Sheehan explores the complex relationship between folk art, fine art, and American visual culture. More than sixty catalogue entries by scholars, curators, and Colby students identify previously unknown makers and subjects, uncover new information about the construction and original contexts of works in the collection, and enlarge our understanding of what these artworks meant for the people who made and displayed them.

In this innovative and original collection, people are seen as active agents in the development of new ways of understanding the past and creating histories for the present. Chapters explore forms of public history in which people's experience and understanding of their personal, national and local pasts are part of their current lives.

The essays assembled here represent forty years of reflection about the European cultural past by an eminent historian. The volume concentrates on the Renaissance and Reformation, while providing a lens through which to view problems of perennial interest. A Usable Past is a book of unusual scope, touching on such topics as political thought and historiography, metaphysical and practical conceptions of order, the relevance of Renaissance humanism to Protestant thought, the secularization of European culture, the contributions of particular professional groups to European civilization, and the teaching of history. The essays in A Usable Past are unified by a set of common concerns. William Bouwsma has always resisted the pretensions to science that have shaped much recent historical scholarship and made the work of historians increasingly specialized and inaccessible to lay readers. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, he argues that since history is a kind of public utility, historical research should contribute to the self-understanding of society.