History Commons^™

What Price History: Politics, Commercialism, And Urban Preservation, Theodore J. Karamanski

Theodore J. Karamanski

Historic preservation is the child of the city. In North America, the United States Conference of Mayors served as midwife to the birth of the modern historic preservation movement, when in January 1966, it issued the report With a Heritage So Rich. The report’s authors argued that in losing historic buildings and districts to urban renewal America was severing a vital link to the past. “Connections between successive generations of Americans—concretely linking their ways of life—are broken by demolition. Sources of memory cease to exist.” Part coffee-table book and part policy proposal, the volume laid the foundation for the …