Review: Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation by Ned Kaufman; Our Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing the Destruction of Our Cultural and Natural Environment by Thomas F. King

Abstract

Ned Kaufman Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation . New York: Routledge, 2009, xi + 421 pp., 50 b/w illus. $39.95, ISBN 9780415965408 Thomas F. King Our Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing the Destruction of Our Cultural and Natural Environment . Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2009, 200 pp., no illus. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 1598743813 Place, Race, and Story presents essays on historic preservation's past and future that are intellectually provocative, culturally incisive, and politically astute. At its core this book challenges the twentieth-century alliance, or confusion, between the practices of architectural history and historic preservation. That alliance often tended to define historic preservation as a curatorial pursuit, committed to preserving a three-dimensional encyclopedia of the objects of historians’ desire, aesthetically and stylistically considered. This framing of historic preservation drastically narrowed its social and cultural possibilities. Ned Kaufman points the way toward a more relevant, expansive, and vital historic preservation movement; a movement committed to social equity, steeped in ethnography and politics and guided less by the imperatives of architectural history practice and more by sensitivity to the human values manifested in everyday attachments to place. Some historic preservation practitioners have used the criteria and models of architectural history to insulate their work from social claims of various stakeholders and communities. Kaufman argues, “It is hard to understand how separating heritage from society's most pressing concerns can enhance the cause of conservation.” He challenges the tendency of many not-for-profit preservation organizations that allocate “resources to protect a historic site admired by architectural historians” (9) while making no effort to discover and help protect sites that are meaningful to a much broader array of neighborhood and community groups. Kaufman does not stand alone. Retiring in 2010 as president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Richard Moe reflected on the field; he wrote, “Historic preservation has evolved into something much more than just saving historic buildings. Today it is about people and the places that they care about—where they live, work, shop, worship, and celebrate. We need historic places to help ground us in our past, but also in our future, as …