The Power of Place and Bending the Future Reading Summaries

Dolores Hayden’s 1995 work The Power of Place and Max Page and Martha Miller’s Introduction to their 2006 edited essay collection Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States both examine the potential of the historic preservation of spaces and landmarks to cultivate senses of belonging and cultural citizenship among diverse urban populaces. In particular, these authors recommend a preservation and historic acknowledgement of spaces that represent the lives and experiences of working-class and non-white communities. As these works suggest, a more diversified and inclusive historic preservation will help to communicate the roles of varying communities in shaping and reinterpreting the built environment in order to meet the needs of their changing present.

These works contribute to a larger historiographic discussion on historic preservation and the role of the built environment in creating senses of belonging and collective identity among the populace. One such work that contributed to these conversations is urban planner Jane Jacobs’ 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities. During the late 1950s, Jacobs argued for the vitality and cultural importance of Manhattan’s urban neighborhoods as a means of combatting infamous New York City developer Robert Moses’ massive urban renewal projects that sought to upend many New York neighborhoods. In response, The Death and Life of Great American Cities argued that the role of urban planner should be to use the built environment of city parks and public buildings as a means of fostering collective neighborhood identities.[1] While Jacobs was not a historic preservationist per se, her avocation of urban designs that nurtured senses of communal identities and understandings remained influential upon crafting inclusive urban preservationist designs. In 1966, shortly after the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act, various authors published an essay collection entitled With Heritage So Rich. This collection advocated for preservation practices that provided historical understanding though the use of physical sites.[2] Robert Stipe’s 2003 edited essay collection A Richer Heritage: Historic Preservation in the United States in the Twenty-First Century provides readers with strategies to cultivate a more inclusive and expansive twenty-first century historic preservation. Andrew Hurley applied both Jacobs’ theories of the urban neighborhoods and the strategies of previous preservation essay collections to the context of the historic preservation of underserved postindustrial areas. According to Hurley’s 2010 work Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities, historic preservation and other public history projects can cultivate attachments to place and senses of belonging in neighborhoods struggling for economic revenue and city services. Such a process aims to restore the prideful, collective neighborhood-based identities of which Jacobs writes.[3]

            Both The Power of Place and Bending the Future pursue different strategies towards similar ends. Dolores Hayden argues for the use and preservation of urban landscapes as a means of nurturing the collective memory of the city. This process provides a sense of urban belonging to marginalized groups often ignored by historical preservation initiatives. In The Power of Place, Hayden stresses that such a process involves both mapping political and cultural narratives onto architecture and spatializing social history.[4] For Hayden, historic preservation must emphasize sites of everyday working-class life such as housing projects, factories, and union halls.[5] By preserving and historicizing these sites, social histories embedded in urban space that fosters a greater sense of community investment and interest in the past emerge.[6] For Dolores Hayden, the social history of public space is the best avenue towards creating an inclusive and meaningful public history of the urban environment.

            Bending the Future’s introduction takes a somewhat similar stance. Yet, unlike Hayden, Page and Miller advocate for a series of measures that seek to improve upon historic preservation techniques used since the National Historic Preservation Act’s 1966 passage.[7] Yet, as Hayden similarly showed, historic preservationists still struggle with the act of preserving sites relating to the histories of people of color, women, and LGBTQ communities. Scholars like Jamie Kalven argue that such preservationist narratives should directly engage the ways that structural inequalities are often expressed and reinforced by the built environment.[8] Furthermore, Page and Miller argue that historic preservation can simultaneously fight the gentrification-fueled displacement that often accompanies recently preserved neighborhoods. In fact, scholar Graciela Sanchez argues that historic preservationists in communities of color must also be anti-gentrification activists in order to ensure that their historical work does not have adverse effects.[9] Such a conundrum represents an important challenge for preservations in an age where “revitalization” is often synonymous with the displacement of lower-income residents.

            While Dolores Hayden specifically argues for a place-based social history embedded within historic preservation techniques, Bending the Future’s introduction lists a series of points regarding approaches to the changing field of historic preservation. While both authors address concerns over gentrification occurring as a result of historic preservation, neither address such issues in a manner that lists actual tactics for ameliorating these unwanted outcomes. In an age where more urban neighborhoods are rapidly becoming cultural centers for the wealthy, it is worth considering expanding public history concepts of shared authority beyond crafting historical narratives. In an era of gentrification, if historical preservation is to be truly inclusive and beneficial to marginalized communities, it must be accompanied by some organization or legislation designed to ameliorate the harmful effects of capitalism. Historic preservations should not only involve communities in preservation projects, but also be involved in advocating for collectively-owned housing, community land trusts, heightened rent controls, and tenants unions. While both works provide important analysis in terms of creating more inclusive historical narratives through historical preservation, it is important that such inclusivity remains in the neighborhoods that the project represents. This is a task that involves more than simply history, but activism as well.

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[1] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 129.

[2] Max Page and Marla R. Miller, “Introduction” in Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States, ed. Max Page et al. (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 2.

[3] Andrew Hurley, Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), ix-x.

[4] Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 9-10.

[5] Ibid, 11.

[6] Ibid, 45-7

[7] Page and Miller, 3.

[8] Page and Miller, 27.

[9] Page and Miller, 31.

Label & Survey

Label on the Context of the Russian Revolution

“Peace, Land, and Bread!”, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin famously demanded. Russia’s journey towards Communism began in February 1917 when thousands of Russian workers flooded the streets of modern day Saint Petersburg to protest their government. These protests eventually led to the ouster of Tsar Nicholas II and the imposition of the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky. While many supported the Kerensky government, some hoped to push the Revolution in a more radical direction and give increased power to worker’s committees known as “soviets.” These politics were realized in the Bolshevik’s October Revolution of 1917, Yet, political resentment still raged in Russia.  As the USS Olympia docked at Murmansk in 1918, civil war raged between the Bolsheviks’ Red Guards and more conservative forces known as the White Army. For the burgeoning Soviet Union, the road to political stability would remain fraught with disagreement and tension.

Works Cited

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Hosking, Geoffrey, Russian History: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Rabinowitch, Alexander. The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007.

Interview Questions

1.     Do you go to history exhibits?

2.     What types of exhibits do you enjoy?

3.     Are familiar with the Spanish Influenza Outbreak of 1918?

4.     Do you think the public should be informed and educated about disease prevention measures?

5.     Would you be interested in learning more about the Spanish Influenza Outbreak of 1918?

For my survey, I interviewed three Philadelphia residents ages twenty-three to twenty six. All three of these individuals stated that they rarely go to history exhibits. One indicated that they simply don’t go to such exhibits and two stated that they occasionally go to history exhibits. Anticipating a lackluster response regarding history exhibits, I also asked what these individuals what types of exhibits they enjoy in hopes that we might be able to incorporate aspects of other exhibit types into our own and attract a larger audience. All recipients enjoyed art exhibits. However, one individual also stated that they enjoyed exhibits with old artifacts. Another person I interviewed stated that he specifically enjoyed art exhibits with large paintings and displays. This same person also enjoyed exhibits that provided good context to their displays.

While all three people I interviewed thought educational programs around disease prevention remained important, only one recipient expressed familiarity with the history of the Spanish Flu. One person even said they knew “absolutely nothing” about the pandemic. However, while few knew anything about the disease outbreak, two interviewees expressed some interest in visiting an exhibit on the outbreak. Only one person remained uninterested. It is my belief that if our group incorporates some of the survey results regarding what aspects of exhibits these persons enjoy, we can attract a diverse public to our eventual exhibit.

Creating Exhibitions with the Power of Place

This week, our Managing History class read the book Creating Exhibitions: Collaboration in the Planning and Design of Innovative Experiences by Polly McKenna-Cress and Janet Kamien. Like Beverly Serrell’s Exhibit Labels: An Interpretative Approach, Creating Exhibitions is a tell-all, step-by-step guide detailing how Museum Professionals create successful, engaging exhibitions. In this sense, McKenna-Cress and Kamien’s work functions more as a textbook than an academic work with an over-arching argument. The book details everything from how to make sure one’s exhibit team is functioning in a collaborative and productive manner to creating exhibit budgets that account for possible expenditures. McKenna-Cress and Kamien’s insightful analysis remains helpful to anyone taking on the task of creating an exhibit.

I found the section on exhibit experiences to be particularly helpful. In an age where information and virtual experiences remain so readily accessible, museum exhibits must strive to offer visitors experiences that they might not obtain in other learning environments. Creating Exhibitions identifies three manners in which Museum Professionals can engage diverse publics through their exhibitions: possessing objects that pertain to the exhibit’s theme, creating an authentic experience, and making the exhibit a social environment in which visitors can have a dialogue with the exhibit itself and other visitors regarding the exhibit’s topic.[1] In the text, the authors write about how having an exhibit in an authentic space in which the event or exhibit theme actually occurred can help to engage visitors with the exhibit’s theme and provide them with an experience uncommonly found in everyday life. It is the curators’ job to encourage these experiences through their exhibit and provide designs or activities that stimulate a deeper contemplation of a particular place in its historical context.[2]

When I was in elementary school, my favorite historical museum was, without a doubt, the National Park Service’s Alcatraz Island Federal Penitentiary site. I probably went on the site tour seven or eight times. As an eight year old boy, the experience of being inside a prison cell or walking down the corridor where the State once imprisoned Al Capone really immersed me in the history of the site. This seems voyeuristic and ethically questionable now (I was eight), but the site’s headset tour with its voices of actual prisoners and sounds of people clanking silverware against steel bars made me feel like I was personally experiencing what being imprisoned on an island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay was actually like. Place is a really powerful tool for an exhibit if an exhibit design’s can bring out those emotions that the historicity of a site evokes.

When planning what our ideal “1918 Influenza Outbreak” exhibit would look like, Chelsea suggested that the exhibit should incorporate Philadelphia’s industrial character in some way. Accounting for the ways in which industry drove immigrants to Philadelphia and later, in part, provided quarters in which Influenza would spread, an exhibit on the outbreak might be most effective if housed in a former industrial site in Kensington or South Philly. After reading Creating Exhibitions and further contemplating the power of place in an exhibit, I like this idea even more. It would just be our job to excavate the emotions that place potentially evokes through the craft of our design.

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[1] Polly McKenna-Cress and Janet Kamien, Creating Exhibitions: Collaboration in the Planning and Design of Innovative Experiences (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 135.

[2] Ibid, 137.

Defiant Braceros

This week, our class took a week off from our usual discussions of assigned readings to work on our label write-ups and research for our project on the 1918 Influenza outbreak. Our labels seem to be coming along smoothly. Yet, the real treat of the week was getting to hear historian and now Smithsonian curator Mireya Loza’s presentation “The Bracero Program, Migration, and Political History.” Loza’s research examines the Bracero Program of the mid-twentieth century that brought millions of Mexican to work in the Southwestern United States’ agricultural industry on guest-worker visas.

While Historians have studied the Bracero Program for decades, Loza’s research provides a new intimate lens with which to view this labor program, excavating stories of changing ethnic identities and queer relationships. Such stories of personal identification remain difficult to grasp solely from traditional primary source research. In fact, much of Loza’s findings emerge from her oral history work with the Bracero History Archive that conducted hundreds of oral histories with former Bracero workers in both the United States and Mexico.

From these exchanges, she discovered the prevalence of Indigenous people who participated in this program. Furthermore, such participants told Loza of how the program exposed them to the Eurocentric societal norms and Spanish vernacular of Mexican society and enabled them, in their mind, to shed their indigenous identity. As someone who conducts oral histories in their own research, I often worry about the ethical concerns that emerge with this process. Unlike reading documents in an archive, oral history involves the developing of relationships with another person, as well as their recounting of intimate details to the researcher. In my opinion, this creates a higher set of stakes around placing a narrative upon someone else’s experiences. The questions of how a person is portrayed and how the exposure of certain tidbits of information will affect this person’s life become extremely important. In these instances, it is tempting for the researcher to push concerns of their subject aside and solely focus on crafting a ground-breaking, exciting historical narrative. Oral History really drives home the point that people’s reputations and dignities remain involved the creation of these narratives.

During the question and answer section of the talk, I asked Loza about these ethical concerns and she revealed that she too occasionally grapples with these issues. However, in her case, Braceros felt incredibly invested in having their stories told, stressing the need to reveal the brutality and dehumanization of the program. Oftentimes, Braceros asked to appear vulnerable and exposed in their historical depictions because that is how they felt as events unfolded. In this sense, the relationships that Loza formed with her subjects enabled an environment of shared authority to flourish. The stories that interviewees told Loza eventually made up the arguments of her book Defiant Braceros and her Smithsonian exhibit “Bittersweet Harvests.” With the help of her subjects, Loza exposed the U.S. and Mexican governments’ roles in exploiting these workers and, on a personal level, the effects of such a program upon workers’ sense of themselves. Loza’s work remains truly collaborative and inspiring.