Inside the Heritage Idea: Facts, Heroes, and Commemorations in the Twentieth Century
Inside the Heritage Idea: Facts, Heroes, and Commemorations in the Twentieth Century

Summary/Abstract: In all eras, people have received events with fear, seeing in them dangerous discontinuities, susceptible of threatening the stability of existing structures. But, while traditional societies rarefied surprises through traditions and the cyclical time according to which they lived, modern societies tributary to linear, accelerated time are perpetuated through an excess of typified news, always the same, which render the event banal, transforming the unusual (accidents, death, cataclysms) into current events. The present becomes, much too quickly, immediate history, one that explains and renders everything historical, even before the event itself is thoroughly consummated.

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