Tag Archive

historic preservation

Editor’s Corner: Burdens Borne, and Raised

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Editors’ note: We publish The Public Historian editor James F. Brooks’s introduction to the November 2020 issue of The Public Historian here. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members and to others with subscription access. Read More

La Vida de Chihuahuita: Telling the Story of a Border Community

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Chihuahuita is one of the oldest neighborhoods in El Paso, Texas. With only a few residential blocks, it sits at one of the city’s original border crossings into Mexico. The neighborhood, named as such because it was the first stop of immigrants from the adjacent state of Chihuahua, is hemmed in today by the border wall, railroads, and the Texas Department of Transportation’s (TxDOT) Border West Expressway. Read More

Repairing National Register nominations: educational institutions and the National Register process

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Authors’ Note: This is the third of three posts resulting from discussions of our 2019 NCPH annual meeting working group on improving existing National Register nominations. (The first post highlighted technical matters and the second discussed underrepresented communities and the integrity criterion.) Read More

Repairing National Register nominations: underrepresented communities and integrity

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Authors’ Note: This is the second of three posts resulting from discussions of our 2019 NCPH annual meeting working group on improving existing National Register nominations.  (The first post focused on technical matters.) In this series, we’ll highlight best practices we developed—using our working group member case statements as a starting point—to encourage frequent revisions of National Register nominations. Read More

Repairing National Register nominations: technical matters

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Authors’ Note: This is the first of three posts resulting from discussions of our 2019 NCPH annual meeting working group on improving existing National Register nominations. In this series, we’ll highlight best practices we developed—using our working group member case statements as a starting point—to encourage frequent revisions of National Register nominations. Read More

John Lennon Slept Here: Looking for Fans in Public History

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As I stood in a small room on Menlove Avenue in Liverpool, England, that had belonged to John Lennon, I bopped my head along to the Del-Vikings song playing, looked out at the blue suburban skies, and imagined John Lennon there, doing his dreaming, in this room at his Aunt Mimi’s. Read More

“What Could It Have [Been] Then?”: Reflecting on the origins and historiography of a plantation historic site

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A big house. Stately trees. Curious outbuildings. In 1905, Pennsylvania-born tourist Matilda Kessinger marveled at the landscape before her, “something one always reads about but never sees.” After 18 years of traveling the South, Kessinger had finally found the one place that lived up to her romantic ideals of an antebellum plantation. Read More

Community-driven mitigation: Murals, canal stones, and a walking tour

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Jack Schmitt has mixed feelings about the way that the Pennsylvania Route 28 project turned out. On one hand, the longtime Pittsburgh historic preservation advocate beams when he talks about how he successfully convinced the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) to replicate historic Pennsylvania Canal lock stones in a retaining wall in the urban highway corridor. Read More

My community’s history is racist. How can I correct it?

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This is an exciting and anxiety-producing moment in the United States. It is a time when professional historians are stepping outside their classrooms and consulting practices to push for the removal of Confederate statues and for greater public dialogue about the roles that white supremacy played in the past and how it persists in our communities. Read More