Negotiating the Past: The Making of Canada's National Historic Parks and Sites

Dennis Blake is a high-school history teacher with the Halton Board of
Education.

Taylor’s Negotiating the Past is a welcome contribution to the
Canadian historiography of material culture. Covering the nascent or
formative period of national heritage programming from the 1880s to the
mid-1960s, Taylor’s exploration of the tensions between the local and
federal heritage outlook, and the shape that policies took as a function
of this, provides invaluable intellectual grounding for all those
interested in the heritage field. Chapter 8, “Conserving the
Architectural Landscape, 1954-67,” is an especially valuable
introductory overview on a subject that affects the daily lives of most
urban Canadians.

This work is rich in detail and seeks to build strong contextual
understandings in terms of both historical sensitivity to the nature of
the bureaucracies and the philosophies that surrounded the historic
evolutions of our national heritage systems. Because of this emphasis,
Negotiating the Past is best suited for the specialist or the truly
dedicated generalist, since the density of the text can, at times,
demand a disciplined reading and concentration on the myriad of detailed
threads that make up the historical tapestry of the Canadian federal
government’s historic parks and sites program.

Owing to the dearth of material available to the scholar and general
reader in this area, it would be appropriate to recommend Taylor’s
research as a seminal intellectual departure point in any study that
seeks to explore relationships between politics, culture, heritage, and
national and local identities.