Tag Archive

National Historic Preservation Act commemoration

Preserving in place the stories that matter

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On October 15, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) into law and formally established historic preservation as a priority of the federal government. Since that time, individuals and communities across the nation have used the structures and powers it established, such as the National Register, state and tribal preservation offices, and the Section 106 review process, to both draw attention to important and threatened places significant to our local, state, and national stories and to preserve those places so that future generations will also be able to connect with the stories that they hold. Read More

I, Too, Sing America: Integrating the voices of all Americans in historic preservation

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Editor’s note: This post concludes a series commemorating the anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act by examining a part article published in The Public Historian, describing its significance and relating it to contemporary conversations in historic preservation. 

Historic preservation exists to tell stories of our journeys as a people and as a nation, but somehow along the way the stories of America’s African American, Latino, Asian, and Native American communities are erased or obscured as historians and preservationists tell the great American story. Read More

Fighting for a better memorial?

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Editor’s note: This post continues a series commemorating the anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act by examining a past article published in The Public Historian, describing its significance and relating it to contemporary conversations in historic preservation. 

In this latest post in our series on the National Historic Preservation Act, Mary Rizzo, former co-editor of The Public Historian and current assistant professor of professional practice at Rutgers University-Newark, interviews Sam Imperatrice about the article “Geographies of Displacement: Latina/os, Oral History, and the Politics of Gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District,” by Nancy Raquel Mirabel. Read More

Pennsylvania’s hallowed ground: A role for historic preservation

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Editor’s note: This post continues a series commemorating the anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act by examining a past article published in The Public Historian, describing its significance and relating it to contemporary conversations in historic preservation. 

The saga of the Locust Grove Cemetery, an African American burial ground in the small borough of Shippensburg, is one that is repeated across the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Read More

Trashy history: Infrastructure as historic property

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Editor’s note: This post continues a series commemorating the anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act by examining a past article published in The Public Historian, describing its significance and relating it to contemporary conversations in historic preservation. 

Everything is bigger in Texas, even its infrastructure. Read More

The fifty-year stumbling block

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Editor’s note: This post continues a series commemorating the anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act by examining a past article published in The Public Historian, describing its significance and relating it to contemporary conversations in historic preservation. 

Assessing properties for listing in the National Register of Historic Places is rarely an easy process. Read More

Historic preservation shines a light on a dark past

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Editor’s note: This post continues a series commemorating the anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act by examining a past article published in The Public Historian, describing its significance and relating it to contemporary conversations in historic preservation. 

Between 2011 and 2014, the city of Decatur, Georgia, demolished 200 public housing units built in 1940, under the auspices of slum clearance. Read More

Robert M. Utley: Founder of the National Historic Preservation Program

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 Editor’s note: This post continues a series commemorating the anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act by examining a past article published in The Public Historian, describing its significance and relating it to contemporary conversations in historic preservation.

An able administrator and respected historian, Robert Utley was selected at age 34 by National Park Service Director George Hartzog to become Chief Historian. Read More

Building the public trust: Preservation’s middle age?

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Editor’s note: This post continues a series commemorating the anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act by examining a past article published in The Public Historian, describing its significance and relating it to contemporary conversations in historic preservation.

When Madeline Cirrillo Archer published “Where We Stand: Preservation Issues in the 1990s,” she sought to assess the challenges facing a movement that was a quarter-century old. Read More

Harvesting the romance of the past

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Editor’s note: This post continues a series commemorating the anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act by examining a past article published in The Public Historian, describing its significance, and relating it to contemporary conversations in historic preservation.

Growing up as an American Indian boy in Oklahoma, I struggled every April 22nd with “89er Day,” an elementary school mini-holiday that celebrated the 1889 opening of central Oklahoma to white settlement. Read More