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Full-Text Articles in Oral History

From A Culture Of Poverty To A Culture Of Property: Preservation And Urban Crisis In The "City Of Homes", Brian F. Whetstone Aug 2023

From A Culture Of Poverty To A Culture Of Property: Preservation And Urban Crisis In The "City Of Homes", Brian F. Whetstone

Doctoral Dissertations

From a Culture of Poverty to a Culture of Property: Preservation and Urban Crisis in the “City of Homes” explores the intersection of the historic preservation movement and the urban crisis from the vantage point of Springfield, Massachusetts in the two decades following the passage of the landmark National Historic Preservation Act in 1966. Rather than explore the workings of larger professional or governmental preservation organizations, this dissertation instead centers the role of community preservationists—those homeowners, community activists, and founders of neighborhood organizations who pursued historic preservation as an avocation and articulated preservation’s significance at the scale of their homes, …


Fantasy Frontier: Old West Theme Parks And Memory In California, Amanda Tewes Nov 2017

Fantasy Frontier: Old West Theme Parks And Memory In California, Amanda Tewes

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines sites of Old West tourism—specifically the three California theme parks of Knott’s Berry Farm, Calico Ghost Town, and Frontier Village—as avenues through which the myth of “the West” gets propagated, even among the people of the American West, and even if these sites do not reflect the actual history of the region. California’s Old West theme parks act as windows into mid-twentieth-century cultural conflicts of politics and identity within the state. But these sites are artifacts of a particular historical moment and their fantasy of the Old West memorializes mid-century renderings of the past rather than nineteenth-century …