Ambient History : Material Traces of World War II in Contemporary Warsaw

The book presents the role urban fabric plays in constructing the wartime history of Warsaw. It focuses on history embedded in matter and details the practices followed by municipal institutions, artists and historical reenactors, who pull history out of the background through their actions.

Ambient History presents the role urban fabric plays in constructing the wartime history of Warsaw. It focuses on history embedded in matter and details the practices followed by municipal institutions, artists and historical reenactors who pull history out of the background through their actions. The book offers a new perspective on the material history of the city. It presents the concept of ambient history – history hidden in the background, in the landscape – waiting to be utilised by individuals coming into contact with the fabric of the city. It draws on anthropological considerations of history which embrace non-academic methods of conceptualising the past and processes of democratising history. The book has two principal objectives. One is to give theoretical grounding to the term ‘ambient history’, which facilitates the conceptualisation of material history and the role experiencing it plays in the process of constructing history. The other is to try and determine the limits of the heuristic potential of posthumanist reflection on materiality in reference to research focused on the making of history. Therefore, the book is valuable reading for researchers studying non-academic methods of curating history: scholars investigating materiality and things, anthropologists of history, scholars of heritage studies, experts in urban studies, historians focused on public history and archaeologists analysing the discipline’s theory.