In this inventive book, Peter Fritzsche explores how Europeans and Americans saw themselves in the drama of history, how theytook possession of a past thought t... » 

In this inventive book, Peter Fritzsche explores how Europeans and Americans saw themselves in the drama of history, how theytook possession of a past thought to be slipping away, and how they chose to follow. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, contemporaries saw themselves as occupants of an utterly new period. Increasingly disconnected from an irretrievable past, worried about an unknown and dangerous future, they described themselves as indisputably modern. To be cast in the new time of the nineteeth century was recognize the weird shapes of historical change, to see landscapes scattered with ruins, and to mourn the remains of a bygone era. Tracing the scars of history, writers and painters, revolutionaries and exiles, soldiers and widows, and ordinary home dwellers took a passionate, even flamboyant, interest in the past. They argued politics, wrote diaries, devoured memoires, and collected antiques, all the time charting their private paths against the tremors of public life. THese nostalgic histories take place on battlefields trampled by Napoleon, along bucolic English hedges, against the fairytail silhouettes of the Grimms' beloved Germany, and in the newly constructed parlors of America's western territories. This eloquent book takes a surprising, completely original look at the modern age: our possessions, our heritage, and our newly considered selves. «