How we make history - and what we then make of it - is engagingly
dramatized in T. H. Breen's portrait of a 350-year-old American
community faced with the costs of its progress. In the particulars
of one town's struggle to check development and save its natural
environment, Breen shows how our sense of history reflects our
ever-changing self-perceptions and hopes for the future. Breen
first went to East Hampton, the celebrated Long Island resort town,
to write about the Mulford Farmstead, a picturesque saltbox dating
from the 1680s. Through his research, he came across a fascinating
cast of local characters, past and present, who contributed to,
invented, and reinvented the town's history. Breen's work also drew
him into contemporary local affairs: factionalism among residents,
zoning disputes, and debates over resource management. Driving
these heated issues, Breen found, were some dearly held notions
about a harmonious, agrarian past that conflicted with what he had
come to know about the divisiveness and opportunism of East
Hampton's early days. Imagining the Past is about the interplay
between some of the East Hampton histories Breen encountered: the
official histories of many generations, the myths and oral
traditions, and the curious stories that Breen, as an outsider,
discerned in the town's rich holdings of artifacts and documents.
With a warm yet wry regard for human nature, Breen obliges us to
confront our pasts in all their complexities and ironies, no matter
how unsettling or inconvenient the experience.
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