Restoring America: Historic Preservation and the New Deal - Couverture rigide

Gray, Stephanie

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1625348983 ISBN 13 : 9781625348982

Editeur : University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

Synopsis

Exploring how the New Deal shaped history through politically driven commemoration During the Great Depression, Americans employed historic preservation as a tool to address the political, economic, and social upheavals of the era. Inspired by the Roosevelt administration's unprecedented support of federal arts projects, US politicians, architects, laborers, artisans, and local boosters skillfully used New Deal funds to restore, mythologize, and politicize the 'historic shrines' in their communities. Restoring America illustrates how and why Americans turned to historic preservation as a strategy for managing both political realities and ambitions. Stephanie Gray presents four thoroughly researched and diverse case studies: a colonial theater in the Deep South, a Puritan minister's home in New England, aviator Charles Lindbergh's modest farmhouse and parklands of the Upper Midwest, and a multi-layered Spanish-German-Mexican arts village in the Central South. Collectively, these examples show how the restoration of old places emerged as a popular form of cultural production, an instrument of economic reconstruction, and a striking expression of political theater during the Depression. Moreover, these New Deal preservation projects make evident that any exercise in physically preserving the past is both conservative and progressive, reactive and proactive. Restoring America contends that the federally funded and locally driven preservation initiatives of the 1930s and 1940s can help inform contemporary public history debates over the politics of commemoration and imagine possibilities for future preservation practice.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Stephanie Gray is assistant professor of public history at Duquesne University. She has published on historic preservation in journals such as The Public Historian and Journal of African American History, in blogs like The Metropole, and in government documents.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Massachusetts Press
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1625348983
• ISBN 13: 9781625348982
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 304
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible