Historic Preservation

As usual, this week’s reading spurred a great many thoughts. We finished Cathy Stanton's The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City and read Diane Lea's introduction to A Richer Heritage entitled "America's Preservation Ethos: A Tribute to Enduring Ideals."

The Lea piece was a fairly straightforward history of preservation, both of land as well as buildings. However, while reading the article, I started thinking about two things. First, America is a growing, ever-changing nation with limited space and land. How can we draw the line when deciding what gets preserved as historic and what doesn't? I certainly do not believe that everything should be paved over to make way for something new, but I think we must be smart about preservation and city planning in order to maintain the balance of community heritage and history with progress. For this reason, I was really interested when Lea wrote about how a desire to preserve led to improvements in city planning and developments in architecture. On the flip side, Lea discusses the use of preservation as a means of preventing overcrowding and overgrowth in cities. The dichotomy there is food for thought. Second, the issue of who makes preservation decisions is intriguing. Should wealthy individuals get to decide what to buy and preserve or should this be a community effort? Maybe the best solution is a balance of both. The answer to some of my questions may just be preservation through repurposing. For instance, living in restored old homes preserves the homes while keeping them usable. Or, turning an old, historic office building into apartments means that the building remains standing, but there is room for residential growth as well. For me, though, Lea's most interesting anecdote was that the federal government thought that the National Register of Historic Places was a list that could be compiled and then remain static as if new things would never become old.

I'm still not quite sure what I think about Cathy Stanton's book. Stanton is an anthropologist and an ethnographer; she clearly writes from a very different perspective than a historian. In her book, Stanton hopes to address whether or not public history can change or challenge the status quo and if so, how that might occur. What I took from the reading is that Stanton wants public historians to do two things. They should do good history which engages the community and makes the public want to learn about the past. But, she also wants public historians to bring attention to issues people are facing in the present. Clearly, she’s been disappointed with how Lowell National Historic Park did the latter, particularly in the case of the local Cambodian community. I feel that there is quite enough of a challenge in presenting good, accurate, interesting history which encompasses everyone’s voice and makes people want to come learn. In an ideal world, public historians might be able to be community activists as well, but I’m not sure doing both is possible. It’s something I’ll have to keep thinking about.