Tag Archive

preservation

Unfamiliar terrain: Reevaluating a landmark’s past (Part 2)

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large group of peopleTo address the issue of how to make historic designation and documentation a part of Cliveden’s ongoing dialogue with its various publics, the site sponsored a forum themed around the question “Do National Historic Landmarks Represent Our Historic Values?”  This event was an opportunity to bring together community members, museum professionals, and preservationists from the Germantown area to discuss the NHL process, our research for the nomination, and moreover the changing meaning of Cliveden’s history today, all while enlivening what can otherwise seem on the surface to be a closed and static process of filling out a bureaucratic form. Read More

Unfamiliar terrain: Reevaluating a landmark’s past (Part 1)

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Through the support of the Arts of Citizenship Program at the University of Michigan, I recently found myself, along with my team of colleagues, navigating unfamiliar territory in the form of partnership with Cliveden of the National Trust to update the site’s National Historic Landmark  (NHL) nomination.  Read More

Preservation conversations: When history at work is history at home (Part II)

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Before the mid-1960s, except for domestics and a few other exceptions, South Decatur was exclusively white. It was a place Decatur’s blacks knew to not be after sundown. They knew that they were welcome to clean houses, cut lawns, and bag groceries there during the day but the suburban dream being lived by their white employers was beyond reach. Read More

Preservation conversations: When history at work is history at home (Part I)

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What if after you bought the historic house of your dreams in a neighborhood that billed itself as “historic” you found out that your definition of historic clashed with that of your new neighbors? As a historian with nearly thirty years under my belt in history and historic preservation, that’s precisely what happened in 2011 when my wife and I bought a small Craftsman-influenced home in a Decatur, Georgia, neighborhood. Read More

Would you like a side of history with that? Toward a more holistic public history practice

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Around the time that I took on my current position with The Trustees of Reservations, the organization made an internal change: our historic resources department became the cultural landscapes department, our historic resources staff the cultural resources staff. Why was this significant? Read More

Preservation conversations: Reflections on a visit to Shanghai and Cixi, China

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I was fortunate enough to be invited to China earlier this summer for a conference on urban planning, historic preservation, and cultural development. With so much hyperbole in the press about the “Chinese century,” I expected to be swept away by the stunning economic growth of the Asian giant. Read More