Abstract
The practice of public history in the US, as elsewhere, has always had a paradoxical quality. Although it draws primarily on vernacular and local materials, it has often depended on the support of government at many levels. Indeed, as Ludmilla Jordanova has suggested, the state is at the very heart of public history.1 Inflected by a generally left-leaning political sensibility, the work of American public historians has nonetheless frequently contributed — in ways that this chapter will discuss — to projects that preserve rather than challenge status quo relationships of power and inequality. And the field’s expansion and professionalisation over the past three decades has in many ways worked against practitioners’ own goals of fostering broad public participation in historical inquiry and expression.
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Notes
L. Jordanova, History in Practice ( London: Arnold, 2000 ), p. 155.
The terminology is John Bodnar’s. See J. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 14. 72 People and their Pasts
For an overview of the American public history movement and its antecedents, see R. Conard, Benjamin Shambaugh and the Intellectual Foundations of Public History ( Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002 )
C. Stanton, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City ( Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006 ), pp. 8–16.
The term ‘cultural repair’ is drawn from J. F. Abrams, ‘Lost Frames of Reference: Sightings of History and Memory in Pennsylvania’s Documentary Landscape’, in M. Hufford (ed.) Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 24–38.
L. Glaser, Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site: Administrative History ( Philadelphia and Boston: National Park Service, Northeast Regional Office, 2005 ), pp. 25–6.
B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998 ), p. 7.
B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘World Heritage and Cultural Economics’, in I. Karp et al (eds) Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2006 ), pp. 160–202.
For a fuller exploration of this aspect of post-industrial cultural production, see M. M. Breitbart and C. Stanton, ‘Touring Templates: Cultural Workers and Regeneration in Small New England Cities’, in M. K. Smith (ed.) Tourism, Culture and Regeneration ( Wallingford, UK: CABI, 2006 ), pp. 111–22.
B. Dicks, Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visitability (UK: Open University Press, 2004), pp. 138–9 for a discussion of cultural workers within heritage projects.
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© 2009 Cathy Stanton
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Stanton, C. (2009). The Past as a Public Good: The US National Park Service and ‘Cultural Repair’ in Post-Industrial Places. In: Ashton, P., Kean, H. (eds) People and their Pasts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234468_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234468_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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