As Americans of all political persuasions look back longingly to a preferred past, the power of nostalgia feels inescapable. Our fraught moment calls for investigation of the diverse ways in which appeals were made to tradition in earlier epochs. This pair of panels uses Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition as a conceptual model for such a discussion; however it casts a wider net, examining nostalgic uses of the past in Europe and North America over four centuries (1500-1900.) Whereas The Invention of Tradition emphasized practices, especially ritual practices, these panels focus on a wider array of nostalgic foci including monuments and other buildings, war and natural disasters, ceremony, and travel.

Our three European case studies examine the roles of nostalgia in heritage sites, responses to natural disasters, and imperial projects. Mary Booth considers how, since at least the eighteenth century, British stately homes have been presented as representations of the nation. In the last two hundred years, curators have sought to minimize the imperialist messages of these structures while continuing to present them as quintessentially British, using what Booth describes as techniques of ‘strategic ambiguity.’ Moving from stately calm to tragedy, Carla Ciccozzi explores the role of the past in managing trauma in the aftermath of the L’Aquila earthquake of 2009. She argues that the event’s destruction encouraged residents to engage in a collaborative program of historical reconstruction and relates this project to earlier civic heritage projects in L’Aquila. Finally, in the most explicitly political of the three papers, Kimberly Kennedy considers how Russia’s Tsarist government used memory of the Great Patriotic War (1812) to bolster its imperialist projects in the later nineteenth century. Yet the war was open to diverse interpretations, including Tolstoy’s emphasis on human experience and suffering. In short, all three papers show that nostalgia, far from operating in one register, has itself been characterized by competing and conflicting interpretations.

The papers in this panel—as in its companion, “Histories of Nostalgia: Case Studies from Boston”—emphasize that nostalgia is not just, or even primarily, a political tool. Instead, both panels demonstrate that nostalgia represents a rich field of contestation in which diverse parties construct cultural arguments to further their own legitimacy. It also serves as a tool for delimiting parameters of inclusion and exclusion. We hope that these panels will facilitate future conversations and serve as the foundation for a volume of collected essays.