This book is about memory—about how the past persists into the present, and about how this persistence has been understood over the past two centuries. Since the French Revolution, memory has been the source of an intense disquiet. Fundamental cultural theories have sought to understand it, and have striven to represent its stresses.

First-person interpretation--the portrayal of historical characters through interactive dramatization or roleplaying--is an effective, albeit controversial, method used to bring history to life at museums, historic sites, and other public venues. Stacy Roth examines the techniques of first-person interpretation to identify those that have been most effective with audiences while allowing interpreters to maintain historical fidelity. Past into Present focuses on first-person interpretation's most challenging form: the unscripted, spontaneous, conversational approach employed in "living history" environments such as Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, Conner Prairie in Indiana, and Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. While acknowledging that a wide range of methods can touch audiences effectively, Roth identifies a core set of practices that combine positive communication techniques, classic interpretive philosophy, and time-tested learning theories to promote audience enjoyment, provoke thought and inquiry, convey important messages and themes, and relate to individual visitor interests. She offers numerous examples of conversation and demonstration strategies, visitor behavior profiles, and suggestions for depicting conflict and controversy, and she provides useful character development guidelines, interpretive training advice, and recommendations for adapting first-person interpretation for diverse audiences.

This title includes full-color photographs and facts on how time relates to the past, present and future as well as what people have done, are doing and will do.

This book is about memory--about how the past persists into the present, and about how this persistence has been understood over the past two centuries. Since the French Revolution, memory has been the source of an intense disquiet. Fundamental cultural theories have sought to understand it, and have striven to represent its stresses.

The events related to the 1964 coup and the military dictatorship (1964-85) have become common currency in the recent public debate in Brazil. The issue is especially strategic to the extreme right-wing groups surrounding Jair Bolsonaro, the president elected in 2018. For them, the 1964 coup is cherished and celebrated, marking defeat of the left and the beginning of a political regime oriented towards order and progress. The political project built around Bolsonaro is an attempt to impose a distorted and Manichean view of recent history, both by discourse and attempts of censorship. According to that view, 1964 was not a coup detat, but a revolution that saved Brazilians from communism. In Brazil, history is being manipulated to convince people that the military were good rulers, an image that connects to the present authoritarian (albeit elected) government supported by the Armed Forces. Right-wingers, nostalgic for the 1960s dictatorship, promote initiatives to discredit academic researchers and historians who disagree with their mind set. A Present Past offers a well-founded approach to the history of the military dictatorship. Chapters are dedicated to analysing the most controversial topics of the current debate. The primary aim is to disseminate knowledge about the prevailing dictatorship circumstances, with a firm eye on how the past military regime impacts on the present. The purpose is to prevent peddlers of fake news and the ultra-right negationists from winning over the Brazilian public with their authoritarian versions of history. In sum, this is a book committed to democracy. This commitment does not imply any disrespect for the academy, or for opposing points of view, but at its heart it defends historiography via scientific method to counter authoritarian imposition of a historical narrative that supports dictatorship in any form and its leaders, political and military, remaining in power through coercion.

Roger Sale’s Seattle, Past to Present has become a beloved reflection of Seattle’s history and its possible futures as imagined in 1976, when the book was first published. Drawing on demographic analysis, residential surveys, portraiture, and personal observation and reflection, Sale provides his take on what was most important in each of Seattle’s main periods, from the city’s founding, when settlers built a city great enough that the railroads eventually had to come; down to the post-Boeing Seattle of the 1970s, when the city was coming to terms with itself based on lessons from its past. Along the way, Sale touches on the economic diversity of late nineteenth-century Seattle that allowed it to grow; describes the major achievements of the first boom years in parks, boulevards, and neighborhoods of quiet elegance; and draws portraits of people like Vernon Parrington, Nellie Cornish, and Mark Tobey, who came to Seattle and flourished. The result is a powerful assessment of Seattle’s vitality, the result of old-timers and newcomers mixing both in harmony and in antagonism. With a new introduction by Seattle journalist Knute Berger, this edition invites today's readers to revisit Sale’s time capsule of Seattle—and perhaps learn something unexpected about this ever-changing city.

In Past, Present, and Future, Asimov has culled the best of his essays (some of which appear here for the first time) to form a fascinating journey through the world of astronomy, nuclear power, medicine, physics, history, music, film, politics, and other popular subjects. Our preeminent popularizer of science, Asimov takes on many of today's most discussed issues here - Star Wars, the Chernobyl disaster, genetic engineering, the creationism/evolution debate - with a flair, verve, and mastery that have won him innumerable readers. But he also includes many essays written in a personal vein, giving us disarmingly humorous accounts of his triple-bypass surgery and his "Hollywood Non-Career." An entertaining look at Asimov's committment to living in New York City (which he calls "Paradise") is afforded in "I Love New York." On a grand tour of the years ahead, in chapters like "Living on the Moon," "2084," "Should We Fear the Computer?" and "The New Learning," we are shown a future that is thrilling, fearsome, and, as the author insists, our present responsibility. Destined to take its place on the shelves of every Asimov fan, Past, Present, and Future is at once rational, argumentative, informal, and charming.