Week 6: Urban Public History

Courtesy of Illicit Cultural Property.

         

Courtesy of Builders Booksource.

            This weeks reading was from Delores Hayden’s book, “The Power of Place: Urban Landscaping as Public History.”  The first section, “Claiming Urban Landscapes as Public History,” “proposes new ways to understand the urban cultural landscape” and is broken up into three chapters (xii).  The first chapter “Contested Terrain” looks at Herbert J. Gans and Ada Louise Huxtable’s debate over the preservation of “historic landmarks” and what made a building worth saving and preserving.  Gans and Huxtable both agreed that preserving the built history was important but disagreed on what should be preserved; Gans wanted more social history while Huxtable wanted more culture.  Hayden argues that “the power of place- the power of ordinary landscapes to nurture citizens’ public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared territory- remains untapped” for ethnic and women’s history (9). 

            The second chapter “Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space,” looks at what “place” is and how people view it differently.  People of different ethnic groups and women view places very differently and areas histories have been shaped from the separation of women and those who are ethnically different.  “Political divisions of territory split the urban world into many enclaves experienced from many different perspectives.” (27) 

Courtesy of PennDesign.

            The third chapter “Place Memory and Urban Preserving,” looks at how urban landscape is connected to memory and is an important resource for public history.  The Brass Workers History and the New York Chinatown History Project are examples of community oral history.  In recent years, more areas that are connected to ethnic communities and women’s history have been preserved, such as the Boston African American National Historic Site and a Women’s Rights National Historical Park at Seneca Falls, New York.