front cover of The Antiquities Act
The Antiquities Act
A Century of American Archaeology, Historic Preservation, and Nature Conservation
Edited by David Harmon, Frances P. McManamon, and Dwight T. Pitcaithley
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Winner of the State of New Mexico’s Heritage Preservation Award in the category of Heritage Publication

Enacted in 1906, the Antiquities Act is one of the most important pieces of conservation legislation in American history and has had a far-reaching influence on the preservation of our nation’s cultural and natural heritage. Thanks to the foresight of thirteen presidents, parks as diverse as Acadia, Grand Canyon, and Olympic National Park, along with historic and archaeological sites such as Thomas Edison’s Laboratory and the Gila Cliff Dwellings, have been preserved for posterity.

A century after its passage, this book presents a definitive assessment of the Antiquities Act and its legacy, addressing the importance and breadth of the act—as well as the controversy it has engendered. Authored by professionals intimately involved with safeguarding the nation’s archaeological, historic, and natural heritage, it describes the applications of the act and assesses its place in our country’s future. With a scope as far-reaching as the resources the act embraces, this book offers an unparalleled opportunity for today’s stewards to reflect on the act’s historic accomplishments, to remind fellow professionals and the general public of its continuing importance, and to look ahead to its continuing implementation in the twenty-first century.

The Antiquities Act invites all who love America’s natural and cultural treasures not only to learn about the act’s rich legacy but also to envision its next hundred years.
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The Battles of Germantown
Effective Public History in America
David W. Young
Temple University Press, 2019

2020 Philip S. Klein Book Prize Winner, Pennsylvania Historical Association

Known as America’s most historic neighborhood, the Germantown section of Philadelphia (established in 1683) has distinguished itself by using public history initiatives to forge community. Progressive programs about ethnic history, postwar urban planning, and civil rights have helped make historic preservation and public history meaningful. The Battles of Germantown considers what these efforts can tell us about public history’s practice and purpose in the United States.  

Author David Young, a neighborhood resident who worked at Germantown historic sites for decades, uses his practitioner’s perspective to give examples of what he calls “effective public history.” The Battles of Germantown shows how the region celebrated “Negro Achievement Week” in 1928 and, for example, how social history research proved that the neighborhood’s Johnson House was a station on the Underground Railroad. These encounters have useful implications for addressing questions of race, history, and memory, as well as issues of urban planning and economic revitalization. 

Germantown’s historic sites use public history and provide leadership to motivate residents in an area challenged by job loss, population change, and institutional inertia. The Battles of Germantown illustrates how understanding and engaging with the past can benefit communities today.

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Bending the Future
Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States
Edited by Max Page and Marla R. Miller
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
The year 2016 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act, the cornerstone of historic preservation policy and practice in the United States. The act established the National Register of Historic Places, a national system of state preservation offices and local commissions, set up federal partnerships between states and tribes, and led to the formation of the standards for preservation and rehabilitation of historic structures. This book marks its fiftieth anniversary by collecting fifty new and provocative essays that chart the future of preservation.

The commentators include leading preservation professionals, historians, writers, activists, journalists, architects, and urbanists. The essays offer a distinct vision for the future and address related questions, including, Who is a preservationist? What should be preserved? Why? How? What stories do we tell in preservation? How does preservation contribute to the financial, environmental, social, and cultural well-being of communities? And if the "arc of the moral universe . . . bends towards justice," how can preservation be a tool for achieving a more just society and world?
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Beyond Berlin
Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Paul B. Jaskot, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Beyond Berlin breaks new ground in the ongoing effort to understand how memorials, buildings, and other spaces have figured in the larger German struggle to come to terms with the legacy of Nazism. The contributors challenge reigning views of how the task of "coming to terms with the Nazi Past" (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) has been pursued at specific urban and architectural sites. Focusing on west as well as east German cities—whether prominent metropolises like Hamburg, dynamic regional centers like Dresden, gritty industrial cities like Wolfsburg, or idyllic rural towns like Quedlinburg—the volume's case studies of individual urban centers provide readers with a more complex sense of the manifold ways in which the confrontation with the Nazi past has directly shaped the evolving form of the German urban landscape since the end of the Second World War. In these multidisciplinary discussions of important intersections with historical, art historical, anthropological, and geographical concerns, this collection deepens our understanding of the diverse ways in which the memory of National Socialism has profoundly influenced postwar German culture and society.

Scholars and students interested in National Socialism, modern Germany, memory studies, urban studies and planning, geography, industrial design, and art and architectural history will find the volume compelling. Beyond Berlin will appeal to general audiences knowledgeable about the Nazi past as well as those interested in historic preservation, memorials, and the overall dynamics of commemoration.
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Beyond Preservation
Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities
Authored by Andrew Hurley
Temple University Press, 2010

Across the United States, historic preservation has become a catalyst for urban regeneration. Entrepreneurs, urban pioneers, and veteran city dwellers have refurbished thousands of dilapidated properties and put them to productive use as shops, restaurants, nightclubs, museums, and private residences. As a result, inner-cities, once disparaged as zones of poverty, crime, and decay have been re-branded as historic districts. Although these preservation initiatives, often supported by government tax incentives and rigid architectural controls, deserve credit for bringing people back to the city, raising property values, and generating tourist revenue, they have been less successful in creating stable and harmonious communities.

Beyond Preservation proposes a framework for stabilizing and strengthening inner-city neighborhoods through the public interpretation of historic landscapes. Its central argument is that inner-city communities can best turn preserved landscapes into assets by subjecting them to public interpretation at the grass-roots.  Based on an examination of successful projects in St. Louis, Missouri and other U.S. cities, Andrew Hurley demonstrates how rigorous historical analysis can help communities articulate a local identity and plan intelligently on the basis of existing cultural and social assets.    

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Boston's Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them
Joseph M. Bagley
Brandeis University Press, 2021

As Boston approaches its four-hundredth anniversary, it is remarkable that it still maintains its historic character despite constant development. The fifty buildings featured in this book all pre-date 1800 and illustrate Boston’s early history. This is the first book to survey Boston’s fifty oldest buildings and does so through an approachable narrative which will appeal to nonarchitects and those new to historic preservation. Beginning with a map of the buildings’ locations and an overview of the historic preservation movement in Boston, the book looks at the fifty buildings in order from oldest to most ­recent. Geographically, the majority of the buildings are located within the downtown area of Boston along the Freedom Trail and within easy walking distance from the core of the city. This makes the book an ideal guide for tourists, and residents of the city will also find it interesting as it includes numerous properties in the surrounding neighborhoods. The buildings span multiple uses from homes to churches and warehouses to restaurants. Each chapter features a building, a narrative focusing on its historical significance, and the efforts made to preserve it over time. Full ­color photos and historical drawings illustrate each building and area. Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them presents the ideals of historic preservation in an approachable and easy­-to-­read manner appropriate for the broadest audience. Perfect for history lovers, architectural enthusiasts, and tourists alike. 

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City at the Center of the World
Space, History, and Modernity in Quito
Ernesto Capello
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011

In the seventeenth century, local Jesuits and Franciscans imagined Quito as the “new Rome.” It was the site of miracles and home of saintly inhabitants, the origin of crusades into the surrounding wilderness, and the purveyor of civilization to the entire region. By the early twentieth century, elites envisioned the city as the heart of a modern, advanced society—poised at the physical and metaphysical centers of the world.
    In this original cultural history, Ernesto Capello analyzes the formation of memory, myth, and modernity through the eyes of Quito’s diverse populations. By employing Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopes, Capello views the configuration of time and space in narratives that defined Quito’s identity and its place in the world. He explores the proliferation of these imaginings in architecture, museums, monuments, tourism, art, urban planning, literature, religion, indigenous rights, and politics. To Capello, these tropes began to crystallize at the end of the nineteenth century, serving as a tool for distinct groups who laid claim to history for economic or political gain during the upheavals of modernism.
      As Capello reveals, Quito’s society and its stories mutually constituted each other. In the process of both destroying and renewing elements of the past, each chronotope fed and perpetuated itself. Modern Quito thus emerged at the crux of Hispanism and Liberalism, as an independent global society struggling to keep the memory of its colonial and indigenous roots alive.

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The Copan Sculpture Museum
Ancient Maya Artistry in Stucco and Stone
Barbara W. Fash
Harvard University Press, 2011

The Copan Sculpture Museum in western Honduras features the extraordinary stone carvings of the ancient Maya city known as Copan. The city’s sculptors produced some of the finest and most animated buildings and temples in the Maya area, in addition to stunning monolithic statues and altars. The ruins of Copan were named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1980, and more than 150,000 national and international tourists visit the ancient city each year.

Opened in 1996, the Copan Sculpture Museum was initiated as an international collaboration to preserve Copan’s original stone monuments. Its exhibits represent the best-known examples of building façades and sculptural achievements from the ancient kingdom of Copan. The creation of this on-site museum involved people from all walks of life: archaeologists, artists, architects, and local craftspeople. Today it fosters cultural understanding and promotes Hondurans’ identity with the past.

In The Copan Sculpture Museum, Barbara Fash—one of the principle creators of the museum—tells the inside story of conceiving, designing, and building a local museum with global significance. Along with numerous illustrations and detailed archaeological context for each exhibit in the museum, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to the history and culture of the ancient Maya and a model for working with local communities to preserve cultural heritage.

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Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities
James Cuno
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022
A pathbreaking call to halt the intertwined crises of cultural heritage attacks and mass atrocities and mobilize international efforts to protect people and cultures.
 
Intentional destruction of cultural heritage has a long history. Contemporary examples include the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, mosques in Xinjiang, mausoleums in Timbuktu, and Greco-Roman remains in Syria. Cultural heritage destruction invariably accompanies assaults on civilians, making heritage attacks impossible to disentangle from the mass atrocities of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Both seek to eliminate people and the heritage with which they identify.
 
Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities assembles essays by thirty-eight experts from the heritage, social science, humanitarian, legal, and military communities. Focusing on immovable cultural heritage vulnerable to attack, the volume's guiding framework is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a United Nations resolution adopted unanimously in 2005 to permit international intervention against crimes of war or genocide. Based on the three pillars of prevent, react, and rebuild, R2P offers today's policymakers a set of existing laws and international norms that can and—as this book argues—must be extended to the protection of cultural heritage. Contributions consider the global value of cultural heritage and document recent attacks on people and sites in China, Guatemala, Iraq, Mali, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. Comprehensive sections on vulnerable populations as well as the role of international law and the military offer readers critical insights and point toward research, policy, and action agendas to protect both people and cultural heritage. A concise abstract of each chapter is offered online in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish to facilitate robust, global dissemination of the strategies and tactics offered in this pathbreaking call to action.
 
The free online edition of this publication is available at getty.edu/publications/cultural-heritage-mass-atrocities. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.
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The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox
Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-Historical Landscape and its European Dimension
Edited by Tom Bloemers, Henk Kars, Arnold Van der Valk, and Mies Wijnen
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

Increasingly, the role of heritage management is to anticipate and guide future environmental change rather than to simply protect landscapes of the past. This charge presents a paradox for those invested in the preservation of the past: in order to preserve the historic environment, they have to collaborate with others who wish to change it, and in order to apply their expert knowledge, they must demonstrate its benefits for policy and society. The solution advocated here is an integrative landscape approach that draws on multiple disciplines and establishes links between archaeological-historical heritage and planning and between research and policy.

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Digital Techniques for Documenting and Preserving Cultural Heritage
Anna Bentkowska-Kafel
Arc Humanities Press, 2017
In this unique collection the authors present a wide range of interdisciplinary methods to study, document, and conserve material cultural heritage. The methods used serve as exemplars of best practice with a wide variety of cultural heritage objectshaving been recorded, examined, and visualised. The objects range in date, scale, materials, and state of preservation and sopose different research questions and challenges for digitization, conservation, and ontological representation of knowledge. Heritage science and specialist digital technologies are presented in a way approachable to non-scientists, while a separate technical section provides details of methods and techniques, alongside examples of notable applications of spatial and spectral documentation of material cultural heritage, with selected literature and identification of future research. This book is an outcome of interdisciplinary research and debates conducted by the participants of the COST Action TD1201, Colour and Space in Cultural Heritage, 2012–16 and is an Open Access publication available under a CC BY-NC-ND licence.
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Heritage Keywords
Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage
Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels
University Press of Colorado, 2015

Situated at the intersection of scholarship and practice, Heritage Keywords positions cultural heritage as a transformative tool for social change. This volume unlocks the persuasive power of cultural heritage—as it shapes experiences of change and crafts present and future possibilities from historic conditions—by offering new ways forward for cultivating positive change and social justice in contemporary social debates and struggles. It draws inspiration from deliberative democratic practice, with its focus on rhetoric and redescription, to complement participatory turns in recent heritage work.

Through attention to the rhetorical edge of cultural heritage, contributors to this volume offer innovative reworkings of critical heritage categories. Each of the fifteen chapters examines a key term from the field of heritage practice—authenticity, civil society, cultural diversity, cultural property, democratization, difficult heritage, discourse, equity, intangible heritage, memory, natural heritage, place, risk, rights, and sustainability—to showcase the creative potential of cultural heritage as it becomes mobilized within a wide array of social, political, economic, and moral contexts.

This highly readable collection will be of interest to students, scholars, and professionals in heritage studies, cultural resource management, public archaeology, historic preservation, and related cultural policy fields.

Contributors include Jeffrey Adams, Sigrid Van der Auwera, Melissa F. Baird, Alexander Bauer, Malcolm A. Cooper, Anna Karlström, Paul J. Lane, Alicia Ebbitt McGill, Gabriel Moshenska, Regis Pecos, Robert Preucel, Trinidad Rico, Cecelia Rodéhn, Joshua Samuels, Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels, and Klaus Zehbe.


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Historic Capital
Preservation, Race, and Real Estate in Washington, D.C.
Cameron Logan
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Washington, D.C. has long been known as a frustrating and sometimes confusing city for its residents to call home. The monumental core of federal office buildings, museums, and the National Mall dominates the city’s surrounding neighborhoods and urban fabric. For much of the postwar era, Washingtonians battled to make the city their own, fighting the federal government over the basic question of home rule, the right of the city’s residents to govern their local affairs.  

In Historic Capital, urban historian Cameron Logan examines how the historic preservation movement played an integral role in Washingtonians’ claiming the city as their own. Going back to the earliest days of the local historic preservation movement in the 1920s, Logan shows how Washington, D.C.’s historic buildings and neighborhoods have been a site of contestation between local interests and the expansion of the federal government’s footprint. He carefully analyzes the long history of fights over the right to name and define historic districts in Georgetown, Dupont Circle, and Capitol Hill and documents a series of high-profile conflicts surrounding the fate of Lafayette Square, Rhodes Tavern, and Capitol Park, SW before discussing D.C. today.

Diving deep into the racial fault lines of D.C., Historic Capital also explores how the historic preservation movement affected poor and African American residents in Anacostia and the U Street and Shaw neighborhoods and changed the social and cultural fabric of the nation’s capital. Broadening his inquiry to the United States as a whole, Logan ultimately makes the provocative and compelling case that historic preservation has had as great an impact on the physical fabric of U.S. cities as any other private or public sector initiative in the twentieth century.

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Historic Preservation
Collective Memory and Historic Identity
Barthel, Diane
Rutgers University Press, 1996
Historic preservation is a cultural movement gaining momentum and adherents throughout Europe and the United States. How do we decide what to preserve and how to preserve? Who benefits from the efforts of preservationists, curators, developers, and other "symbolic bankers" to safeguard an increasing variety of structures for future generations? Diane Barthel raises these and other questions in this important new book. Taking a comparative approach, Barthel finds that preservation in Britain has largely been an elite enterprise aimed at preserving traditional values. In the United States, by contrast, the pattern is much more dynamic and democratic, though also more permeated by commercialism. Is preservation becoming another means of consuming history, like media representations or "historic" shopping outlets? Or does it have a special significance as a very tangible means of getting in touch with our collective and individual pasts? These and other issues--including war and remembrance, agrarian and industrial preservation, and religious preservation in a secular society--demonstrate the significance of what Barthel calls "the Preservation Project" and why we all have a stake in how our history is reconstructed and interpreted.
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HISTORY IN URBAN PLACES
THE HISTORIC DISTRICTS OF THE UNITED STA
DAVID HAMER
The Ohio State University Press, 1998

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Inventories and Surveys for Heritage Management
Lessons for the Digital Age
David Myers
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
This open-access publication provides essential guidance on digital inventories and surveys for the identification, conservation, and management of heritage places.

A critical first step in the conservation of cultural heritage is to identify and understand the places we want to protect. Inventories and surveys are essential tools in this effort, and their use in managing national, regional, and local heritage is mandated in heritage-related legislation across the globe. Despite the widespread understanding of the importance of inventories and surveys, however, practical, up-to-date guidance on how they should be created, implemented, and maintained has been substantially lacking—until now.
 
This publication draws from the Getty Conservation Institute’s ongoing work with heritage inventories and on the Los Angeles Office of Historic Resources’ experience with SurveyLA. It provides technical advice, guidance, and lessons learned for employing inventories and surveys as tools for heritage conservation and management.

The free online edition of this open-access publication will be available at www.getty.edu/publications/inventories-and-surveys. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book.
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Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory
Michael Wallace
Temple University Press, 1996

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Museums, Monuments, and National Parks
Toward a New Genealogy of Public History
Denise D. Meringolo
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
The rapid expansion of the field of public history since the 1970s has led many to believe that it is a relatively new profession. In this book, Denise D. Meringolo shows that the roots of public history actually reach back to the nineteenth century, when the federal government entered into the work of collecting and preserving the nation's natural and cultural resources. Scientists conducting research and gathering specimens became key figures in a broader effort to protect and interpret the nation's landscape. Their collaboration with entrepreneurs, academics, curators, and bureaucrats alike helped pave the way for other governmental initiatives, from the Smithsonian Institution to the parks and monuments today managed by the National Park Service.

All of these developments included interpretive activities that shaped public understanding of the past. Yet it was not until the emergence of the education-oriented National Park Service history program in the 1920s and 1930s that public history found an institutional home that grounded professional practice simultaneously in the values of the emerging discipline and in government service. Even thereafter, tensions between administrators in Washington and practitioners on the ground at National Parks, monuments, and museums continued to define and redefine the scope and substance of the field. The process of definition persists to this day, according to Meringolo, as public historians establish a growing presence in major universities throughout the United States and abroad.
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The Once and Future Silver Queen of the Rockies
Georgetown, Colorado, and the Fight for Survival into the Twentieth Century
Christine Bradley
University Press of Colorado, 2018

There are many studies of local communities during their heydays, but the life of a community in decline is rarely studied. The Once and Future Silver Queen of the Rockies delves into the life of Georgetown, Colorado, after the turn of the twentieth century as mining in Clear Creek County steadily declined and ultimately collapsed.

One of the earliest mining communities in the state, Georgetown began to struggle for survival as the nineteenth century drew to a close. The price of silver dropped precipitously while other mining camps were still opening around the region. The new, bright future once envisioned for the “Silver Queen of the Rockies” began to fade. Yet the community managed to survive and re-create itself in the new world of the twentieth century. Tourism, skiing, and historic preservation replaced mineral extraction as the basis of the regional economy. Today, Georgetown maintains the aesthetic feel of a nineteenth-century mining town and stands as an example of community-supported historic preservation.

This richly illustrated sequel to The Rise of the Silver Queen tells the compelling story of Georgetown’s survival, and ultimate flourishing, after the loss of its principal industry. It is an interesting and engaging addition to the history of Colorado and the West.

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Patina
A Profane Archaeology
Shannon Lee Dawdy
University of Chicago Press, 2016
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the world reacted with shock on seeing residents of this distinctive city left abandoned to the floodwaters. After the last rescue was completed, a new worry arose—that New Orleans’s unique historic fabric sat in ruins, and we had lost one of the most charming old cities of the New World.
 
In Patina, anthropologist Shannon Lee Dawdy examines what was lost and found through the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. Tracking the rich history and unique physicality of New Orleans, she explains how it came to adopt the nickname “the antique city.” With innovative applications of thing theory, Patina studies the influence of specific items—such as souvenirs, heirlooms, and Hurricane Katrina ruins—to explore how the city’s residents use material objects to comprehend time, history, and their connection to one another. A leading figure in archaeology of the contemporary, Dawdy draws on material evidence, archival and literary texts, and dozens of post-Katrina interviews to explore how the patina aesthetic informs a trenchant political critique. An intriguing study of the power of everyday objects, Patina demonstrates how sharing in the care of a historic landscape can unite a city’s population—despite extreme divisions of class and race—and inspire civil camaraderie based on a nostalgia that offers not a return to the past but an alternative future.
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Plazas and Barrios
Heritage Tourism and Globalization in the Latin American Centro Histórico
Joseph L. Scarpaci
University of Arizona Press, 2004
In recent years the travel industry has promoted trips to cultural landscapes that contain great historical and symbolic landmarks, and Latin American towns and cities are anything but isolated from this trend. Many historic city centers in Latin America have been preserved intact from the colonial era and today may serve institutional, commercial, or residential needs. Now economic forces from outside the region have created a demand for the preservation of historically "authentic" districts.

This book explores how heritage tourism and globalization are reshaping the Latin American centro histórico, analyzing the transformation of the urban core from town plaza to historic center in nine cities: Bogotá, Colombia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Cartagena, Colombia; Cuenca, Ecuador; Havana, Cuba; Montevideo, Uruguay; Puebla, Mexico; Quito, Ecuador; and Trinidad, Cuba. It tells how these pressures, combined with the advantage of a downtown location, have raised the potential of redeveloping these inner city areas but have also created the dilemma of how to restore and conserve them while responding to new economic imperatives.

In an eclectic and interdisciplinary study, Joseph Scarpaci documents changes in far-flung corners of the Latin American metropolis using a broad palette of tools: urban morphology profiles, an original land-use survey of 30,000 doorways in nine historic districts, numerous photographs, and a review of the political, economic, and globalizing forces at work in historic districts. He examines urban change as reflected in architectural styles, neighborhood growth and decline, real estate markets, and local politics in order to show the long reach of globalization and modernity.

Plazas and Barrios spans all of Spanish-speaking America to address the socio-political dimensions of urban change. It offers a means for understanding the tensions between the modern and traditional aspects of the built environment in each city and provides a key resource for geographers, urban planners, architectural historians, and all concerned with the implications of the emerging global economy.
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Prague Panoramas
National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century
Cynthia Paces
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009
Prague Panoramas examines the creation of Czech nationalism through monuments, buildings, festivals, and protests in the public spaces of the city during the twentieth century. These “sites of memory” were attempts by civic, religious, cultural, and political forces to create a cohesive sense of self for a country and a people torn by war, foreign occupation, and internal strife. 

The Czechs struggled to define their national identity throughout the modern era. Prague, the capital of a diverse area comprising Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Poles, Ruthenians, and Romany as well as various religious groups including Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, became central to the Czech domination of the region and its identity. These struggles have often played out in violent acts, such as the destruction of religious monuments, or the forced segregation and near extermination of Jews.

During the twentieth century, Prague grew increasingly secular, yet leaders continued to look to religious figures such as Jan Hus and Saint Wenceslas as symbols of Czech heritage. Hus, in particular, became a paladin in the struggle for Czech independence from the Habsburg Empire and Austrian Catholicism.

Through her extensive archival research and personal fieldwork, Cynthia Paces offers a panoramic view of Prague as the cradle of Czech national identity, seen through a vast array of memory sites and objects. From the Gothic Saint Vitus Cathedral, to the Communist Party's reconstruction of Jan Hus's Bethlehem Chapel, to the 1969 self-immolation of student Jan Palach in protest of Soviet occupation, to the Hosková plaque commemorating the deportation of Jews from Josefov during the Holocaust, Paces reveals the iconography intrinsic to forming a collective memory and the meaning of being a Czech. As her study discerns, that meaning has yet to be clearly defined, and the search for identity continues today.
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A President, a Church and Trails West
Competing Histories in Independence, Missouri
Jon E. Taylor
University of Missouri Press, 2008

Over the past century, three nationally significant histories have vied for space and place in Independence, Missouri. Independence was declared Zion by Joseph Smith, served as a gathering and provisioning point for trails west, and was called home by President Harry S. Truman for sixty-four years. Historian Jon E. Taylor has integrated research from newspapers, public documents, oral histories, and private papers to detail how the community has preserved and remembered these various legacies.

Truman’s legacy would appear to have been secured in Independence via three significant designations—his presidential library opened there in 1957, his neighborhood was designated a national historic landmark in 1972, and his home was declared a national historic site in 1982. However, Taylor argues that Truman’s seeming dominance in the community’s memory is in fact endangered by competition from the other aspects of the town’s historical heritage.

Taylor considers the role Mormon history has played in the city's history and chronicles how the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints returned to Independence to fulfill Joseph Smith's dream of creating Zion in the city, a situation that impacted neighborhoods near the Truman home.  Taylor also examines the city's fascination with the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California trails, detailing how that history was lost and remembered and is now immortalized on the Independence square and in the National Frontier Trails Museum.

In the 1980s, the city council reduced the size of the Truman Heritage District, created to maintain Truman’s association with his neighborhood, after church opposition. At the same time, city officials pushed to make Independence a major tourist destination, a move largely dependent upon the city capitalizing on its association with Truman. These inconsistent policies and incongruous goals have led to innumerable changes in the landscape Truman enjoyed during his legendary morning walks.

 A President, a Church, and Trails West chronicles one city’s struggle to preserve its history and the built environment. Taylor places the role of preservation in Independence not only within the larger context of preservation in the United States but also within the context of American environmental history. This volume is sure to appeal to anyone interested in public history, historic preservation, history and memory, and local history.

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Protecting Heritage in the Caribbean
Peter E. Siegel
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Heritage preservation is a broad term that can include the protection of a wide range of human-mediated material and cultural processes ranging from specific artifacts, ancient rock art, and features of the built environment and modified landscapes. As a region of multiple independent nations and colonial territories, the Caribbean shares a common heritage at some levels, yet at the same time there are vast historical and cultural differences. Likewise, approaches to Caribbean heritage preservation are similarly diverse in range and scope.
 
This volume addresses the problem of how Caribbean nations deal with the challenges of protecting their cultural heritages or patrimonies within the context of pressing economic development concerns. Is there formal legislation that requires cultural patrimony to be considered prior to the approval of development projects? Does legislation apply only to government-funded projects or to private ones as well? Are there levels of legislation: local, regional, national? Are heritage preservation laws enforced? For whom is the heritage protected and what public outreach is implemented to disseminate the information acquired and retained?
 
In this volume, practitioners of heritage management on the frontline of their own islands address the current state of affairs across the Caribbean to present a comprehensive overview of Caribbean heritage preservation challenges. Considerable variability is seen in how determined and serious different nations are in approaching the responsibilities of heritage preservation. Packaging these diverse scenarios into a single volume is a critical step in raising awareness of the importance of protecting and judiciously managing an ever-diminishing fund of Caribbean heritage for all.
 
Contributors
Todd M. Ahlman / Benoît Bérard / Milton Eric Branford / Richard T. Callaghan / Kevin Farmer / R. Grant Gilmore III / Jay B. Haviser / Ainsley C. Henriques / William F. Keegan / Bruce J. Larson / Paul E. Lewis / Vel Lewis / Reg Murphy / Michael P. Pateman / Winston F. Phulgence / Esteban Prieto Vicioso / Basil A. Reid / Andrea Richards / Elizabeth Righter / Kelley Scudder-Temple / Peter E. Siegel / Christian Stouvenot / Daniel Torres Etayo
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Remembering Roadside America
Preserving the Recent Past as Landscape and Place
John A. Jakle
University of Tennessee Press, 2011

The use of cars and trucks over the past century has remade American geography—pushing big cities ever outward toward suburbanization, spurring the growth of some small towns while hastening the decline of others, and spawning a new kind of commercial landscape marked by gas stations, drive-in restaurants, motels, tourist attractions, and countless other retail entities that express our national love affair with the open road. By its very nature, this landscape is ever changing, indeed ephemeral. What is new quickly becomes old and is soon forgotten.
            In this absorbing book, John Jakle and Keith Sculle ponder how “Roadside America” might be remembered, especially since so little physical evidence of its earliest years survives. In straightforward and lively prose, supplemented by copious illustrations—historic and modern photographs, advertising postcards, cartoons, roadmaps—they survey the ways in which automobility has transformed life in the United States. Asking how we might best commemorate and preserve this part of our past—which has been so vital economically and politically, so significant to the cultural aspirations of ordinary Americans, yet so often ignored by scholars who dismiss it as kitsch—they propose the development of an actual outdoor museum that would treat seriously the themes of our roadside history.
            Certainly, museums have been created for frontier pioneering, the rise of commercial agriculture, and the coming of water- and steam-powered industrialization and transportation, especially the railroad. Is now not the time, the authors ask, for a museum forcefully exploring the automobile’s emergence and the changes it has brought to place and landscape? Such a museum need not deny the nostalgic appeal of roadsides past, but if done properly, it could also tell us much about what the authors describe as “the most important kind of place yet devised in the American experience.”
 

John A. Jakle is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Keith A. Sculle is the former head of research and education at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. They have coauthored such books as America’s Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Automobile Age; Motoring: The Highway Experience in America; Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age; and The Gas Station in America.

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Saving the Big Thicket
From Exploration to Preservation, 1685-2003
James J. Cozine Jr.
University of North Texas Press, 2004

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Sentinels of History
Reflections on Arkansas Properties on the National Register of Historic Places
Mark Christ
University of Arkansas Press, 2000
Sentinels of History was conceived of as a way to mark the turn of the millennium by the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program. This generously illustrated book contains thirty-nine essays, each of which showcases an important Arkansas site and is written by a noted authority. Also included is a location map for these sites and a full appendix providing location information, county by county, for the more than two thousand surviving properties in Arkansas (as of June 1999) that appear on the National Register. The essays are as wide-ranging as Roger Kennedy's placement of the Toltec Mounds at the time of Charlemagne, Donald Harington's sensitive look at the "bigeminal" architecture of the Wolf dogtrot cabin, and Neil Compton's egalitarian tribute to the Boxley Valley Historic District on the Buffalo National River. At least one current color photo of the site and one historic image are included with each essay. In addition, illustrations of the locations or structures listed in the appendix are scattered throughout sections. In all, Sentinels of History serves as a lavish inventory of historic properties in Arkansas at the end of the twentieth century.
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Shovel Ready
Archaeology and Roosevelt's New Deal for America
Bernard K. Means
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Shovel Ready provides a comprehensive lens through which to view the New Deal period, a fascinating and prolific time in American archaeology.
 
In this collection of diverse essays united by a common theme, Bernard K. Means and his contributors deliver a valuable research tool for practicing archaeologists and historians of archaeology, as well as New Deal scholars in general.
 
To rescue Americans from economic misery and the depths of despair during the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created several New Deal jobs programs to put people to work. Men and women labored on a variety of jobs, from building roads to improving zoos. Some ordinary citizens—with no prior experience—were called on to act as archaeologists and excavate sites across the nation, ranging in size from small camps to massive mound complexes, and dating from thousands of years ago to the early Colonial period.
 
Shovel Ready contains essays on projects ranging across the breadth of the United States, including New Deal investigations in California, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas. Some essays engage in historical retrospectives. Others bring the technologies of the twenty-first century, including accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of curated collections and geophysical surveys at New Deal–excavated sites, to bear on decades-old excavations. The volume closes with an investigation into material remnants of the New Deal itself.
 
Contributors
John L. Cordell / John F. Doershuk / David H. Dye /Scott W. Hammerstedt / Janet R. Johnson / Kevin Kiernan /Gregory D. Lattanzi /Patrick C. Livingood / Anna R. Lunn / Bernard K.  Means / Stephen E. Nash / Amanda L. Regnier / Sissel Schroeder / James R. Wettstaed
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Stewardship of the Built Environment
Sustainability, Preservation, and Reuse
Robert A. Young
Island Press, 2012
When we think of green building, we tend to picture new construction. But Robert A. Young argues that the greenest building is often the one that has already been built. In Stewardship of the Built Environment, he shows how rehabilitating and reusing existing structures holds untapped potential for achieving sustainable communities. Students and professionals alike will discover the multifaceted benefits of reuse.
 
Young begins by describing how historic preservation in the United States, often overlooked because of  the predominant focus on new construction, is actually an important sustainable design strategy. He then examines the social, environmental, and economic benefits of preservation—from the societal value of reusing existing buildings to financial incentives available for rehabilitation. Young concludes with insights into the future of reusing buildings as a sustainability strategy. He also provides several informative appendices, including a glossary of key terms and acronyms and recommendations for further reading.
 
Readers will become familiar with essential terminology; sustainability and historic preservation metrics; government oversight processes; and opportunities for smart growth afforded by rehabilitation. This knowledge is key to preserving the past while building a sustainable future.
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The TDR Handbook
Designing and Implementing Transfer of Development Rights Programs
Arthur C. Nelson, Rick Pruetz, and Doug Woodruff with James C. Nicholas, JulianConrad Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Witten
Island Press, 2011
"Transfer of Development Rights" (TDR) programs allow local governments to put economic principles to work in encouraging good land use planning. TDR programs most often permit landowners to forfeit development rights in areas targeted for preservation and then sell those development rights to buyers who want to increase the density of development in areas designated as growth areas by local authorities.
 
Although TDR programs must conform to zoning laws, they provide market incentives that make them more equitable (and often more lucrative) for sellers and frequently benefit buyers by allowing them to receive prior approval for their high-density development plans. Since the 1970s when modern TDR applications were first conceived, more than 200 communities in 33 states across the U.S. have implemented TDR-based programs. The most common uses of TDR to date involve protecting farmland, environmentally sensitive land, historic sites, and "rural character," and urban revitalization.
 
Until now, however, there has never been a clearly written, one-volume book on the subject. At last, The TDR Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to every aspect of TDR programs, from the thinking behind them to the nuts and bolts of implementation-including statutory guidance, model ordinances, suggestions for program administration, and comparisons with other types of preservation programs. In addition, six of its twenty chapters are devoted to case studies of all major uses to which TDR programs have been utilized to date, including recent urban revitalization projects that utilize TDR principles.
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Values in Heritage Management
Emerging Approaches and Research Directions
Erica Avrami
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2019
Bringing together leading conservation scholars and professionals from around the world, this volume offers a timely look at values-based approaches to heritage management.
 
Over the last fifty years, conservation professionals have confronted increasingly complex political, economic, and cultural dynamics. This volume, with contributions by leading international practitioners and scholars, reviews how values-based methods have come to influence conservation, takes stock of emerging approaches to values in heritage practice and policy, identifies common challenges and related spheres of knowledge, and proposes specific areas in which the development of new approaches and future research may help advance the field.

The free online edition of this open-access book is available at www.getty.edu/publications/heritagemanagement/ and includes zoomable illustrations. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.
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The Wisconsin Historical Society
Collecting, Preserving, and Sharing Stories Since 1846
John Zimm
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2014
Explore the storied history of this grand Wisconsin treasure – the Wisconsin Historical Society, older than the state itself. From the Society’s earliest days as pioneers worked to record history even as it was happening, to its struggles to weather the Great Depression, and its landmark efforts to record the most important social and political movements of our times. From its very start, the Society has worked to “treasure up” the stories of people from every walk of life, in every corner of the state. The story behind the Wisconsin Historical Society is a uniquely Wisconsin story – one that belongs to all who call Wisconsin home.
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