David Lowenthal

Biography

On April 26, 1923, David Lowenthal was born in New York City to Max Lowenthal and Eleanor Mack. He was also the brother of John Lowenthal.

He earned his PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Before this he graduated with a B.S. in History from Harvard University in 1944 and an M.A. in geography from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950.

Career

Lowenthal served as a research analyst in the U.S. Department of State from 1945 to 1946. From 1952 to 1956, he was an assistant professor of History at Vassar College. From 1956 to 1970 at the University of the West Indies, he was history lecturer, research associate, and a consultant to the vice chancellor. From 1961 to 1972 he worked at the Institute of Race Relations in London. He was a professor of geography at University College, London in 1972–1985 and has been an honorary research fellow there since 1986. (From 1958 to 1972, he was also a research associate at the American Geography Society.)

Contribution

Lowenthal is a specialist in the 19th-century North American philologist, geographer and environmentalist George Perkins Marsh, whose work laid the foundations of the environmental conservation movement in the United States. He advised international heritage agencies and institutions, including UNESCO, the International Council on Monuments and Sites, the International Council of Museums, ICCROM, the Getty Conservation Institute, the World Monuments Fund, the Council of Europe, Europa Nostra, English Heritage, the U.S. National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Trust of Australia, and the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage.

His historical analysis of the ever-changing role of the past in shaping our lives, The Past is a Foreign Country (1985), is widely considered to be a classic text. A revised edition, The Past Is a Foreign Country – Revisited appeared in 2015. Other key texts of his in the field of historical geography include The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1996), George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (2000) and Passage du Temps sur le Paysage' (2008).

Recognition

Lowenthal was awarded several medals by institutions around the world. These include:

In 1965, Lowenthal received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2001, received an Honorary Doctorate from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2008 and was awarded the Forbes Lecture Prize by the International Institute for Conservation in 2010.