Uncomfortable Truths and Hushed Silence: A Re-Examination of Interpretation and its Social Justice Role within Historic Preservation
No Thumbnail Available
Links to Files
Permanent Link
Collections
Author/Creator
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
2015
Department
Program
MA in Historic Preservation
Citation of Original Publication
Rights
To view a complete copy of this thesis please contact Goucher College Special Collections & Archives at archives@goucher.edu or (410) 337-6075.
Subjects
historic preservation practices
interpretation
chattel slavery
National Park Service plantations
Critical Race Theory
public memory
theory-to-practice
cultural arts
reconstruction
bound
unbound
Historic preservation -- Theses
Slavery -- United States -- Collective memory
Plantations -- Historic preservation
Critical race theory
interpretation
chattel slavery
National Park Service plantations
Critical Race Theory
public memory
theory-to-practice
cultural arts
reconstruction
bound
unbound
Historic preservation -- Theses
Slavery -- United States -- Collective memory
Plantations -- Historic preservation
Critical race theory
Abstract
If interpretation is to make connections between places, time, and
people then historic preservation interpreters must comprehensively tell
the story of places, events, objects, and ordinary and significant people
associated with noble and not so noble sides of history. Historic cultural
resources associated with uncomfortable truths are susceptible to
“obliteration” and subject to the same issues of change as other
resources. The passing of time and use, environmental conditions,
climate change, social attitudes, new scholarship, and information that
reveals hidden truths and secrets create the need to re-interpret. One of
the most divisive if not the most divisive event in American history,
chattel slavery, has to be re-presented with “contextualized” narrative
that recognizes “particular” details of both the celebrated hero and
enslaved people. This evaluation of how the lives of enslaved Africans
and African Americans are being re-interpreted at eight colonial to
antebellum period plantations - five National Park Service units and
three private entities - models how perceived changes in the public
memory of slavery is currently being presented.
The result of the critical analysis of conservation treatments,
narrative language, “bound and unbound,” and use of cultural arts and
technology indicate to present relevant 21st Century presentations
reflective of multiple social significances requires an interpretive-centered
field of historic preservation. Using a theory-to-practice approach,
guidelines for comprehensive presentations at plantations move
interpretation to the center of historic preservation, incorporating the
principle of change into the language of the instruments and practices of
the field, making it replicable for other topics.