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Hello, welcome to the last program in our current series. This week on in-artime we will be

discussing the role of history and heritage in the formation of the British national identity.

Some professional historians have maintained a guarded relationship with the heritage industry,

believing that it presents a distorted version of national life, a merry England that is

politically acceptable, good for tourists, but somehow suspect. History in contrast has been

deemed it to seek the war to truth about the past objectively and even scientifically.

How has our understanding of history changed since the 19th century? What is the role of heritage

in national life? And how will historians interpret our time in our society? What will our heritage be?

With me to discuss history and heritage, a David Kanadine, director of the University of London's

Institute of Historical Research and editor of a new book, What Is History Now? David Kanadine is

also commissioner with the organisation English Heritage. Mary Ruben is professor of European

history, Queen Mary University of London and Peter Mangler is fellow in history at Gondville and

Keyes College Cambridge and also the author of a new book, History and National Life.

Peter Mangler, can you give me a definition of what you see as the difference between history and

heritage? Well history is relatively easy to define. It's the study of the past. Although professional

historians sometimes like to narrow down that definition to confine it to the kind of study of

the past that they write about. Heritage is trickier, partly because it's a neologism. It's a relatively

recent coinage. One doesn't really find the phrase in its modern sense until the 1920s and 1930s

and it doesn't really come into common usage until the 1960s or 70s and it then entered as a very

charged concept. I think what it boils down to is those parts of history which people feel that

...