Living History at the Nova Scotia Museum

Living History at the Nova Scotia Museum is about living history. As a concept, living history highlights the role of history as a dimension of the everyday, lived experience of people. It is rooted in early conceptualisations of history, those that predate the rise, formalisation, and institutionalisation of the modern academic discipline of history and historiography. To explore the idea of living history, the author tells stories of industrial heritage at the Nova Scotia Museum (NSM). NSM is a decentralised museum made up of 28 sites, spread across the Eastern Canadian province of Nova Scotia. At NSM, history is performed daily by heritage interpreters, museum visitors, mnemonic devices, and historic buildings. These performances impact our collective condition to imagine our pasts, presents, and futures. Though this point is made using the example of NSM, the book’s broader goal is to suggest that all organisations take part in living history, every day. In their day-to-day practices, organisations perform some version of their past and, in doing so, impact how we see the past. How collectives come to see the past shapes the landscape of history.

The Critical Management Studies series covers topics from management style techniques, corporate culture and cross-cultural management to evaluation, organizational structure and management science and operations, drawing on a range of radical traditions that include feminism, critical theory, Marxism, postmodernism / poststructuralism, critical race theory, environmentalism, labour process theory, postcolonial theory, existentialism and applied critical management studies.