Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, this book identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world. Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved, it demonstrates how it gives tangibility to the values that underpin different communities.

For the first time, the editors of the acclaimed American Heritage(R) Dictionary have applied their efforts to word usage as its own subject. The result is this practical guide that includes chapters on grammar, style, diction, gender, social groups, pronunciation, word formation, science terms, and a subject and a word index.

Emotional Heritage brings the issues of affect and power in the theorisation of heritage to the fore, whilst also highlighting the affective and political consequences of heritage-making. Drawing on interviews with visitors to museums and heritage sites in the United States, Australia and England, Smith argues that obtaining insights into how visitors use such sites enables us to understand the impact and consequences of professional heritage and museological practices. The concept of registers of engagement is introduced to assess variations in how visitors use museums and sites that address national or dissonant histories and the political consequences of their use. Visitors are revealed as agents in the roles cultural institutions play in maintaining or challenging the political and social status quo. Heritage is, Smith argues, about people and their social situatedness and the meaning they, alongside or in concert with cultural institutions, make and mobilise to help them address social problems and expressions of identity and sense of place in and for the present. Academics, students and practitioners interested in theories of power and affect in museums and heritage sites will find Emotional Heritage to be an invaluable resource. Helping professionals to understand the potential impact of their practice, the book also provides insights into the role visitors play in the interplay between heritage and politics.

The Industrial Heritage is the first integrated approach to the assessment, conservation, interpretation, financing and management of the complex heritage of industrial cultures. It breaks new ground, as the authors (both active workers in the field) suggest that concepts of heritage defined to deal with pre-industrial cultures must be modified to deal with the very different demands presented by industrial objects and the societies which produced them. The essence of this book is practicality, offering examples of the real issues which confront those concerned with preserving and managing the industrial heritage.

Historic sites, memorials, national parks, museumsewe live in an age in which heritage is ever-present. But what does it mean to live amongst the spectral traces of the past, the heterogeneous piling up of historic materials in the present? How did heritage grow from the concern of a handful of enthusiasts and specialists in one part of the world to something which is considered to be universally cherished? And what concepts and approaches are necessary to understanding this global obsession? Over the decades, since the adoption of the World Heritage Convention, various e~crisese(tm) of definition have significantly influenced the ways in which heritage is classified, perceived and managed in contemporary global societies. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the many tangible and intangible e~thingse(tm) now defined as heritage, this book attempts simultaneously to account for this global phenomenon and the industry which has grown up around it, as well as to develop a e~toolkit of conceptse(tm) with which it might be studied. In doing so, it provides a critical account of the emergence of heritage studies as an interdisciplinary field of academic study. This is presented as part of a broader examination of the function of heritage in late modern societies, with a particular focus on the changes which have resulted from the globalisation of heritage during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Developing new theoretical approaches and innovative models for more dialogically democratic heritage decision making processes, Heritage: Critical Approaches unravels the relationship between heritage and the experience of late modernity, whilst reorienting heritage so that it might be more productively connected with other pressing social, economic, political and environmental issues of our time.

Archaeology has, on the whole, tended to dominate the development of public policies and practices applicable to what is often referred to as “heritage”. This book aims to examine the conflation of heritage with archaeology that has occurred as a result. To do so, it asks whether archaeology can usefully contribute to critical understandings of heritage, which, the volume contends, must consider heritage both in terms of what it is and the cultural, social and political work it does in contemporary societies. Archaeologists have been very successful in protecting what they perceive to be their database—a success that owes much to the development and maintenance of a suite of heritage management practices that work to legitimize their privileged access to, and control of, that database. However, is archaeological data actually heritage? Moreover, does archaeological knowledge offer a meaningful reflection of “the historic environment”, in terms of the uses, values and associations it carries for the various and different communities or publics that engage with that environment/heritage? The volume brings together academic and field archaeologists, academics from heritage studies and community activists from the UK and Europe more generally to debate these issues.

The concept of heritage relates to the ways in which contemporary society uses the past as a social, political or economic resource. However, heritage is open to interpretation and its value may be perceived from differing perspectives - often reflecting divisions in society. Moreover, the schism between the cultural and economic uses of heritage also gives rise to potential conflicts of interest. Examining these issues in depth, this book is the first sustained attempt to integrate the study of heritage into contemporary human geography. It is structured around three themes: the diversity of use and consumption of heritage as a multi-sold cultural and economic resource; the conflicts and tensions arising from this multiplicity of uses, producers and consumers; and the relationship between heritage and identity at a variety of scales.