David Lowenthal

Historian who launched heritage studies as a new academic discipline

IT IS rare for a scholar to be universally credited with having founded a new field of academic study. But that distinction belongs to David Lowenthal, emeritus professor of geography at University College London, who has died aged 95. Lowenthal more or less single-handedly established heritage studies as an academic discipline in its own right. “Heritage,” he explained, “is not history: heritage is what people make of their history to make themselves feel good.” The historian asks what happened? Why did it happen and why did it happen when it happened? The student of heritage, by contrast, examines fabrications about the past: why was this event remembered and that event forgotten – or even manufactured? Heritage, he declared, is manufactured to “attest our identity and affirm our worth.” He developed this argument in The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) and refined it

The Heritage Crusade and The Spoils of History (1997). History, he declared, is the destruction of myth. Heritage Studies is the forensic examination of how the myth came to be.

Lowenthal was born in New York, the eldest of the three children of Max Lowenthal (the son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania who became a lawyer and confidant of President Harry Truman) and his wife Eleanor (née Mack). In 1943, on graduating from Harvard University with a degree in history, he joined the American army in Europe, photographing roads and buildings in France and then in Germany. Returning after the war to the University of California, Berkeley, he pursued studies in geography and then, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he completed a doctorate on the career and legacy of the 19th century geographer and environmentalist George Perkins Marsh, who had drawn public attention to the impact of human activity on the natural world, and who helped found the Smithsonian Institute.

So it was that Lowenthal became preoccupied with man’s misuse of the natural environment, and with the importance of nature conservation. And so it was, too, that he began a life-long fascination with the manufacture, use and misuse of heritage. For some years he taught both geography and history at Vassar College in New York. But in 1972 he was appointed to the teaching staff of the department of geography at University College London. There he notably lectured undergraduates on the subject of the West Indies and the conservation of historic features, as well as offering seminars to postgraduates. He included soundscapes, such as recordings of ships’ horns in the Far East . His students were also introduced to many of his American academics.

In 1970, he married his colleague Mary Alice Lamberty, and they had two daughters, Eleanor and Catherine. In 2001 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and in 2016 he was awarded the British Academy Medal, in recognition of the genius reflected in The Past is a Foreign Country – Revisited, (2015.)

He also wrote West Indian Societies (1972) and lived long enough to receive the proofs of his last book, Quest for the Unity of Knowledge a few days before his death.

He is survived by his wife, his daughters, a granddaughter and a grandson. GEOFFREY ALDERMAN

David Lowenthal: born April 26,1923. Died September 15, 2018