Documents

THOSE WHO NO LONGER BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF THE ANCESTORS (Download the PDF)

A discussion of the tangible and the intangible heritage question. This text was written in response to opinions published in the ICOMOS News for spring 2000. The whole issue of the News in PDF can be found at www.international.icomos.org/newsicomos/news1991/2000-10-1.pdf.

I have left in the few references to the provoking views, because it would be puzzling and anti-historical to take them out.

Bridge at Mostar. Josephine W. Baker. 1970's. Wikipedia Commons.

THE FOUNTAINS AT THE GORE 
(Download the PDF)

Adapted from a research paper on an important local monument which turns out to have an estranged sibling. The cast-iron fountain in Gore Park, Hamilton, Ontario, was erected in 1859 as part of an epoch-making waterworks project. The city is fortunate to have not only the original pumping house and its walking beam engines, but also the first reservoir, a stone lined basin set into the flank of the Niagara Escarpment, and a portion of the fountain which was placed in Hamilton’s central square (actually a triangle, or gore) to show off the water supply.

THE PICKER PORTABLE GOES NORTH (Download the PDF)

This piece is excerpted from a book about the medical evacuations from the Eastern Arctic to Southern T.B. sanatoria during the 1950s. After the Second World War the Canadian State acquired the technical means to assert its authority and so strengthen its claim to sovereignty in the North by demonstrating “effective occupation” of the territory. The text offered here is from a chapter about the new tools of sovereignty: the semi-icebreaker C.D. Howe, the Picker portable X-ray machine, and the Bell helicopter.

Johanna Van der Woerd, Mary Panigusiq, Maggie Hatuk on the CD Howe 1958.McMaster Health Sciences Archive, Rabinowitz Collection