UBC Press Time Travel: Tourism and the Rise of the Living History Museum in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada

In the 1960s, Canadians could step through time to eighteenth-century trading posts or nineteenth-century pioneer towns. These living history museums promised authentic reconstructions of the past but, as Time Travel shows, they revealed more about mid-twentieth-century interests and perceptions of history than they reflected historical fact. These museums became important components of postwar government economic growth and employment policies. Shaped by political pressures and the need to balance education and entertainment, they reflected Canadians' struggle to establish a pan-Canadian identity in the context of multiculturalism, competing nationalisms, First Nations resistance, and the growth of the state. Review ... Gordon pulls together a staggering amount of materials to provide a compelling glimpse into the history of living history. He illustrates the contradictions that abound―the tensions between scholarship and entertainment; between National and multicultural remembrance; between the colliding narratives of settler and Indigenous histories. There is more to be written on this story, and Gordon has made a significant contribution to this area of historical scholarship.  Time Travel is a useful roadmap that scholars might utilize to explore the fascinating contradictions and interplay between narrative, history and authenticity, so exemplified in the living history museum.  Author: Sean MacPherson Source: BC Studies As a comprehensive history of public history in Canada, Time Travel is a welcome text.  … Time Travel does a wonderful job of connecting experiments in living history with that national past. Author: Claire Campbell, Bucknell University Source: Historical Studies in Education Review In this groundbreaking book, Alan Gordon skilfully weaves together the work of leading thinkers in the fields of living history, tourism, historiography, museology, and heritage to advance our understanding of the development, and emerging theory, of living history museums. Author: Brian Osborne, professor emeritus of geography and planning at Queen’s University Book Description This fascinating look at Canada’s living history museums – pioneer villages and old forts where actors recreate the past – shows how they reveal as much about Canadian post-war interests as they do about settler history. From the Author Alan Gordon is a professor of history at the University of Guelph. He has written extensively about memory, commemoration, and the uses of history. About the Author Alan Gordon is a professor of history at the University of Guelph.