Why Old Places Matter

Why Old Places Matter
Author: Thompson M. Mayes
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2018-09-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 153811769X

Why Old Places Matter is the only book that explores the reasons that old places matter to people. Although people often feel very deeply about the old places of their lives, they don’t have the words to express why. This book brings these ideas together in evocative language and with illustrative images for a broad audience. The book reveals the fundamentally important yet under-recognized role old places play in our lives. While many people feel a deep-seated connection to old places -- from those who love old houses, to the millions of tourists who are drawn to historic cities, to the pilgrims who flock to ancient sites throughout the world -- few can articulate why. The book explores these deep attachments people have with old places –the feelings of belonging, continuity, stability, identity and memory, as well as the more traditional reasons that old places have been deemed by society to be important, such as history, national identity, and architecture. This book will be appealing to anyone who has ever loved an old place. But more importantly, it will be an useful resource to articulate why old places are meaningful to people and their communities. This book will help people understand that the feeling many have for old places is supported by a wide variety of fields, and that the continued existence of these old places is good. It will give people the words and phrases to understand and express why old places matter.

African American Historic Places

African American Historic Places
Author: National Register of Historic Places
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 628
Release: 1995-07-13
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780471143451

Culled from the records of the National Register of Historic Places, a roster of all types of significant properties across the United States, African American Historic Places includes over 800 places in 42 states and two U.S. territories that have played a role in black American history. Banks, cemeteries, clubs, colleges, forts, homes, hospitals, schools, and shops are but a few of the types of sites explored in this volume, which is an invaluable reference guide for researchers, historians, preservationists, and anyone interested in African American culture. Also included are eight insightful essays on the African American experience, from migration to the role of women, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. The authors represent academia, museums, historic preservation, and politics, and utilize the listed properties to vividly illustrate the role of communities and women, the forces of migration, the influence of the arts and heritage preservation, and the struggles for freedom and civil rights. Together they lead to a better understanding of the contributions of African Americans to American history. They illustrate the events and people, the designs and achievements that define African American history. And they pay powerful tribute to the spirit of black America.

Bending the Future

Bending the Future
Author: Max Page
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Cultural property
ISBN: 9781625342140

Riding Preservation's New Wave: How to Build on Movements for Memoria

Historic Pennsylvania

Historic Pennsylvania
Author: Mindy Gulden Crawford
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2019-09-12
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 149304186X

Historic Pennsylvania: A Tour of the State’s Top 100 National Historic Landmarks is a carefully curated travel guide, written by a local historian, featuring the most intriguing and significant of the state's nationally recognized historic landmarks. This guide provides interesting anecdotes and color photography of famous homes and churches, man-made wonders set amid the splendor of nature, and the crumbling remains of the region's industrial, coal mining past. Tour the Keystone State and travel back in time with Historic Pennsylvania.

Stories in Stone: Memorialization, the Creation of History and the Role of Preservation

Stories in Stone: Memorialization, the Creation of History and the Role of Preservation
Author: Emily Williams
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1648890555

In 1866, Alexander Dunlop, a free black living in Williamsburg Virginia, did three unusual things. He had an audience with the President of the United States, testified in front of the Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction, and he purchased a tombstone for his wife, Lucy Ann Dunlop. Purchases of this sort were rarities among Virginia’s free black community—and this particular gravestone is made more significant by Dunlop’s choice of words, his political advocacy, and the racialized rhetoric of the period. Carved by a pair of Richmond-based carvers, who like many other Southern monument makers, contributed to celebrating and mythologizing the “Lost Cause” in the wake of the Civil War, Lucy Ann’s tombstone is a powerful statement of Dunlop’s belief in the worth of all men and his hopes for the future. Buried in 1925 by the white members of a church congregation, and again in the 1960s by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the tombstone was excavated in 2003. Analysis, conservation, and long-term interpretation were undertaken by the Foundation in partnership with the community of the First Baptist Church, a historically black church within which Alexander Dunlop was a leader. “Stories in Stone: Memorialization, the Creation of History and the Role of Preservation” examines the story of the tombstone through a blend of object biography and micro-historical approaches and contrasts it with other memory projects, like the remembrance of the Civil War dead. Data from a regional survey of nineteenth-century cemeteries, historical accounts, literary sources, and the visual arts are woven together to explore the agentive relationships between monuments, their commissioners, their creators and their viewers and the ways in which memory is created and contested and how this impacts the history we learn and preserve.

The Past and Future City

The Past and Future City
Author: Stephanie Meeks
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 161091709X

At its most basic, historic preservation is about keeping old places alive, in active use, and relevant to the needs of communities today. As cities across America experience a remarkable renaissance, and more and more young, diverse families choose to live, work, and play in historic neighborhoods, the promise and potential of using our older and historic buildings to revitalize our cities is stronger than ever. This urban resurgence is a national phenomenon, boosting cities from Cleveland to Buffalo and Portland to Pittsburgh. Experts offer a range of theories on what is driving the return to the city—from the impact of the recent housing crisis to a desire to be socially engaged, live near work, and reduce automobile use. But there’s also more to it. Time and again, when asked why they moved to the city, people talk about the desire to live somewhere distinctive, to be some place rather than no place. Often these distinguishing urban landmarks are exciting neighborhoods—Miami boasts its Art Deco district, New Orleans the French Quarter. Sometimes, as in the case of Baltimore’s historic rowhouses, the most distinguishing feature is the urban fabric itself. While many aspects of this urban resurgence are a cause for celebration, the changes have also brought to the forefront issues of access, affordable housing, inequality, sustainability, and how we should commemorate difficult history. This book speaks directly to all of these issues. In The Past and Future City, Stephanie Meeks, the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, describes in detail, and with unique empirical research, the many ways that saving and restoring historic fabric can help a city create thriving neighborhoods, good jobs, and a vibrant economy. She explains the critical importance of preservation for all our communities, the ways the historic preservation field has evolved to embrace the challenges of the twenty-first century, and the innovative work being done in the preservation space now. This book is for anyone who cares about cities, places, and saving America’s diverse stories, in a way that will bring us together and help us better understand our past, present, and future.

Historic Real Estate

Historic Real Estate
Author: Whitney Martinko
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812296990

A detailed study of early historical preservation efforts between the 1780s and the 1850s In Historic Real Estate, Whitney Martinko shows how Americans in the fledgling United States pointed to evidence of the past in the world around them and debated whether, and how, to preserve historic structures as permanent features of the new nation's landscape. From Indigenous mounds in the Ohio Valley to Independence Hall in Philadelphia; from Benjamin Franklin's childhood home in Boston to St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; from Dutch colonial manors of the Hudson Valley to Henry Clay's Kentucky estate, early advocates of preservation strove not only to place boundaries on competitive real estate markets but also to determine what should not be for sale, how consumers should behave, and how certain types of labor should be valued. Before historic preservation existed as we know it today, many Americans articulated eclectic and sometimes contradictory definitions of architectural preservation to work out practical strategies for defining the relationship between public good and private profit. In arguing for the preservation of houses of worship and Indigenous earthworks, for example, some invoked the "public interest" of their stewards to strengthen corporate control of these collective spaces. Meanwhile, businessmen and political partisans adopted preservation of commercial sites to create opportunities for, and limits on, individual profit in a growing marketplace of goods. And owners of old houses and ancestral estates developed methods of preservation to reconcile competing demands for the seclusion of, and access to, American homes to shape the ways that capitalism affected family economies. In these ways, individuals harnessed preservation to garner political, economic, and social profit from the performance of public service. Ultimately, Martinko argues, by portraying the problems of the real estate market as social rather than economic, advocates of preservation affirmed a capitalist system of land development by promising to make it moral.

The Role of Public-Private Partnerships and the Third Sector in Conserving Heritage Buildings, Sites, and Historic Urban Areas

The Role of Public-Private Partnerships and the Third Sector in Conserving Heritage Buildings, Sites, and Historic Urban Areas
Author: Susan Macdonald
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2014-06-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781937433208

The conservation of cultural heritage requires the involvement of multiple actors from across the public, private, and nongovernmental, or third, sectors, not only to initiate and carry out conservation but also to sustain heritage places. The conservation of the historic urban environment poses specific and urgent challenges that require a multidisciplinary approach in which conservation actions are embedded within economic, social, and environmental development strategies. Increasingly, the private and third sectors are playing a pivotal role in these processes. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are contractual arrangements in which the private and/or third sector assists in delivering a public facility or service by providing funding or operating leadership. The third sector, which may include heritage-related NGOs, as well as people living near a heritage site, is of particular relevance to PPPs used for heritage conservation. This publication focuses specifically on the use of PPPs for historic buildings and historic urban areas, and is targeted to those working in the cultural heritage sector. It draws on existing literature, which it aims to make more accessible to those interested in cultural heritage conservation. While providing information on the basic concepts of public-private partnerships and the roles and responsibilities of the partners in a PPP, this is not a guide to the use of PPPs. It discusses the types of PPPs that have been used to conserve historic buildings and historic urban areas, provides specific examples of where and how they have been used, and demonstrates ways in which PPP mechanisms have met conservation goals. This publication also makes some limited observations on the aims of PPPs drawn from the literature, from published case studies, and from a few further case study investigations. This publication draws on English-language works produced between 1992 and 2012, but concentrates on the more recent literature. Much of this material is from the Australia, the United Kingdom, and other European nations that have been the most active in conducting PPPs for heritage resources and in publishing information about these projects. This overview includes an extensive bibliography and provides some suggestions of topics for further research.