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A critical exploration of how digital technologies are reshaping global heritage conservation, storytelling, and the politics of preservation.

As digital technologies increasingly shape how we preserve, interpret, and experience the past, the field of digital heritage has undergone rapid and transformative growth. This book offers a timely and critical exploration of how tools such as 3D modelling, augmented reality, and mobile applications are redefining the landscape of heritage conservation and storytelling.

Bringing together contributions from international scholars across disciplines, including architectural conservation, archaeology, urban studies, tourism, photography, museology, and game studies, this volume engages with the complex politics, practices, and potentials of digital heritage. The chapters are organized around three thematic strands: the digital politics of conservation, technology as a medium for narrative and interpretation, and the creation of virtual reconstructions of the past.

By critically examining the limitations of traditional preservation methods and the innovative opportunities offered by digital tools, this collection not only reflects the current state of the field but also contributes to its future directions. Featuring culturally and geographically diverse case studies and blending theoretical insight with practical application, the book is essential reading for students, researchers, and professionals in heritage studies, conservation, architecture, archaeology, and cultural tourism.
 

Honorable Mention, New Deal Book Award

Exploring how the New Deal shaped history through politically driven commemoration

During the Great Depression, Americans employed historic preservation as a tool to address the political, economic, and social upheavals of the era. Inspired by the Roosevelt administration’s unprecedented support of federal arts projects, US politicians, architects, laborers, artisans, and local boosters skillfully used New Deal funds to restore, mythologize, and politicize the “historic shrines” in their communities. Restoring America illustrates how and why Americans turned to historic preservation as a strategy for managing both political realities and ambitions.

Stephanie Gray presents four thoroughly researched and diverse case studies: a colonial theater in the Deep South, a Puritan minister’s home in New England, aviator Charles Lindbergh's modest farmhouse and parklands of the Upper Midwest, and a multi-layered Spanish-German-Mexican arts village in the Central South. Collectively, these examples show how the restoration of old places emerged as a popular form of cultural production, an instrument of economic reconstruction, and a striking expression of political theater during the Depression. Moreover, these New Deal preservation projects make evident that any exercise in physically preserving the past is both conservative and progressive, reactive and proactive.

Restoring America contends that the federally funded and locally driven preservation initiatives of the 1930s and 1940s can help inform contemporary public history debates over the politics of commemoration and imagine possibilities for future preservation practice.