Promotional Information

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Living History Time Machines

Part 1: Foundations

1 History on Display

2 The Foundations of Living History in Canada

3 Tourism and History

Part 2: Structures

4 Pioneer Days

5 A Sense of the Past

6 Louisbourg and the Quest for Authenticity

Part 3: Connections

7 Fur and Gold

8 The Great Tradition of Western Empire

9 The Spirit of B & B

10 People and Place

11 Genuine Indians

Conclusion: The Limits of Time Travel

Notes

Index

About 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.

Reviews

Gordon’s research is meticulous and his writing exceptionally coherent. Time Travel is an excellent study of how priorities and preoccupations guide historical interpretation, and an important addition to the study of Canada’s heritage industry.
*Canadian Literature, 236*

... 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. 
*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.
*Historical Studies in Education*

Time Travel is an important book that provides keen insights in the understanding of the emergence of living history museums in mid-twentieth century Canada… In a masterful way, Gordon guides the reader through some of the intellectual debates that shaped the making of the living history museum movement.
*Great Plains Quarterly 38.4*