Tag Archive

preservation

Revealing slavery’s legacy at a public university in the south (Part 3)

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In the final post of this series, we consider how the “Slavery at South Carolina College” project has been received. The most important effects have been local. The website has acted as a catalyst that has increased awareness of slavery at the university and an interest among students and faculty in speaking plainly about that history. Read More

New tools, old tactics deployed to save a historic Atlanta Building

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Earlier this year The New York Times dubbed Atlanta, Ga., “the city too busy to remember.” The play on Civil Rights-era mayor Ivan Allen’s municipal sobriquet came during reporting on Atlanta’s demolition of a historic African American church, Friendship Baptist, to clear the way for new stadium construction. Read More

Producing history and ironwork in an urban crucible (Part II)

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Continued from Part 1.

Portland’s gentrification and redevelopment attracted the attention of Loretta Lees, a United Kingdom professor with family in Maine. She documented the rehabilitation of residential, commercial, and industrial properties and the reconfiguration of public spaces in Portland’s upgrading downtown neighborhoods. Read More

Producing history and ironwork in an urban crucible (Part I)

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Sam Smith’s blacksmith shop is part living history laboratory and part urban sustainability experiment. He is a former history major who turned passions for the past and metalworking into a business that produces objects, artisans, and history in contested space on the edge of a gentrifying Portland, Maine, neighborhood. Read More

A side or B side? Postindustrial artisans walking a fine line (Part II)

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Continued from Part 1.

So how did the small-scale artisans at Fringe fit into the proposals put forward by the master developer candidates at the March meeting? The short answer is: ambiguously. They were clearly seen by the developers as both part of the hipness of the neighborhood and part of the set of problems–what in an earlier era of urban redevelopment was more bluntly termed “blight”–that the proposals aimed to overcome. Read More

"Sustaining Historic Preservation Through Community Engagement": A conversation continued

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At the 2014 annual National Council on Public History conference in Monterey, several of us came together for a roundtable discussion on “Sustaining Historic Preservation Through Community Engagement.” The roundtable was organized and facilitated by Theodore Karamanski from Loyola University and Kristen Baldwin Deathridge from Appalachian State University. Read More

A side or B side? Postindustrial artisans walking a fine line (Part I)

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On a cold March evening this past winter, my students and I caught a bus from Davis Square, near Tufts University, to attend a public meeting in Union Square, at the other end of Somerville, Massachusetts. Within the generally-pricey Boston real estate market of the past two or three decades, Union Square has remained relatively affordable and as a result has been something of a haven for artists, artisans, low-income immigrants, and small, often marginal businesses. Read More

Project showcase: "Cotton Memories" sessions

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Cotton Kingdom SymposiumAs part of a larger project focusing on the history and legacy of cotton-picking and sharecropping in the Mississippi Delta, the non-profit organization Khafre, Inc. is holding weekly sessions throughout the summer of 2014 to gather memories and oral histories from people with roots in the Delta region, especially older African Americans with first-hand knowledge of work in “America’s Cotton Kingdom.” Read More