Author : Tom Stammers
Release : 2020-06-25
Genre : History
Kind :
Book Rating : 224/5 ( reviews)

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The Purchase of the Past - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Purchase of the Past write by Tom Stammers. This book was released on 2020-06-25. The Purchase of the Past available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Offering a broad and vivid survey of the culture of collecting from the French Revolution to the Belle Époque, The Purchase of the Past explores how material things became a central means of accessing and imagining the past in nineteenth-century France. By subverting the monarchical establishment, the French Revolution not only heralded the dawn of the museum age, it also threw an unprecedented quantity of artworks into commercial circulation, allowing private individuals to pose as custodians and saviours of the endangered cultural inheritance. Through their common itineraries, erudition and sociability, an early generation of scavengers established their own form of 'private patrimony', independent from state control. Over a century of Parisian history, Tom Stammers explores collectors' investments – not just financial but also emotional and imaginative – in historical artefacts, as well as their uncomfortable relationship with public institutions. In so doing, he argues that private collections were a critical site for salvaging and interpreting the past in a post-revolutionary society, accelerating but also complicating the development of a shared national heritage.