| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

David Glassberg. Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2001. Pp. xvii, 267. Cloth $50.00, paper $18.95.

American culture has been consistently understood in terms of its mobility and its disconnection to place. In this characterization, the United States is a nation driven by restlessness, steeped not in history but in amnesia. Over the past few decades, work by historians and other scholars on questions of collective memory and place has challenged this image. David Glassberg's book takes its place among contemporary histories that emphasize the local and struggle with the questions of the profession itself. What is the relationship of historians to their communities? In what ways do average Americans engage with the past? What do we mean by a "sense of history," and how do people acquire it? How is this different from history as defined by historians? 1

Glassberg is interested in the grass-roots level at which people understand themselves to be engaging with questions of history and to feel invested in history. His book is a meditation on the meaningfulness of the profession, in which he often speaks of "we" to his fellow historians. He defines a "sense of history" as reflecting "the intersection of the intimate and the historical—the way that past events of a personal and public nature are intertwined, so that public histories often forcefully, and surprisingly, hit home" (p. 6). . . .

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