cultural tourism public history

Heritage Tourism’s History: Past as Prologue for the Anthropocene

• First Online: 15 November 2023

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• Uzi Baram 4  

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Merchants and pilgrims, travelers, tourists are the types and phases in the history of travel. With the Anthropocene, heritage tourism is changing due to the recursive relationship between tourism and heritage destinations. Heritage locales, subject to political and increasing environmental pressures, tell of significant moments for a community (whether local, regional, global) and tourists engage the presented past and the experience can inspire knowledge to be shared with their home communities. This chapter recognizes those going to Anthropocene heritage sights as visitors and explore their potential in documenting climate change, as part of an archaeology that looks to potential futures.

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Acknowledgments

The October 2016 Toronto Workshop opened new scholarly frontiers for my research in heritage tourism. The 2018 Tidally United Summit in Sarasota stressed community engagement for meeting the challenges of rising sea levels in coastal Florida; the 2021 Tidally United Summit on Zoom provided the venue for sharing the evolving New College coastline program. Thanks to Thanik, Pei-Lin, and George for the invitation to Bangkok even if COVID-19 meant we could not gather in person.

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Baram, U. (2023). Heritage Tourism’s History: Past as Prologue for the Anthropocene. In: Yu, PL., Lertcharnrit, T., Smith, G.S. (eds) Heritage and Cultural Heritage Tourism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44800-3_7

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Advisory Council on Historic Preservation

Each year, millions of travelers visit America’s historic places. The National Trust for Historic Preservation defines heritage tourism as “traveling to experience the places, artifacts, and activities that authentically represent the stories and people of the past and present.”  A high percentage of domestic and international travelers participate in cultural and/or heritage activities while traveling, and those that do stay longer, spend more, and travel more often. Heritage tourism creates jobs and business opportunities, helps protect resources, and often improves the quality of life for local residents.

The ACHP has encouraged national travel and tourism policies that promote the international marketing of America’s historic sites as tourism destinations. The ACHP also engages in ongoing efforts to build a more inclusive preservation program, reaching out to diverse communities and groups and engaging them in dialogue about what parts of our national legacy should be more fully recognized, preserved, and shared. 

The ACHP developed Preserve America , a national initiative to encourage and support community efforts for the preservation and enjoyment of America’s cultural and natural heritage. In partnership with other federal agencies, the initiative has encouraged the use of historic assets for economic development and community revitalization, as well as enabling people to experience and appreciate local historic resources through heritage tourism and education programs. These goals have been advanced by an Executive Order directing federal agencies to support such efforts, a community designation program, and a recognition program for outstanding stewardship of historic resources by volunteers.

From 2004-2016, over 900 Preserve America Communities   were designated in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and two territories, as well as nearly 60 Preserve America Stewards . Many Preserve America Communities are featured in “Discover Our Shared Heritage” National Register on-line travel itineraries . From 2006 through 2010, the National Park Service (in partnership with the ACHP) awarded more than $21 million in Preserve America Grants   to support sustainable historic resource management strategies, with a focus on heritage tourism. 

These links are being provided as a convenience and for informational purposes only; if they are not ACHP links, they do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by the ACHP of any of the products, services or opinions of the corporation or organization or individual. The ACHP bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality, or content of the external site or for that of subsequent links. Please contact the external site for answers to questions regarding its content, including its privacy policies.

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Tiya Miles details how public history can reshape our views of the past

Tiya Miles believes a better understanding of the past is as likely to be found in a formal archive, a National Park, or a conversation with an elderly relative as it is in the classroom. Miles , who received a bachelor’s degree in Afro-American Studies from the College in 1992, joined the faculty in 2018 as professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is also the new director of the Warren Center for Studies in American History . Her prize-winning research focuses on African American, Native American, and women’s history in the 19th century, with special attention toward issues of slavery, interracial family and community relations, environmental justice, and links between Black and Native experiences. Next spring, she will teach “Abolitionist Women and Their Worlds,” a public history course supported by the Schlesinger Library Long 19th Amendment Project and the Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship . She spoke to the Gazette about the vital role of public history in shaping American cultural understanding.

GAZETTE:   What first drew you to public history?

MILES: When I began my journey in the landscape of public history, I didn’t even know I had taken the first steps. As a middle schooler, I had two favorite pastimes. Unbeknownst to my parents, I would let myself into the abandoned 19th-century houses in my downtown neighborhood in Cincinnati, examine the rubble around me, and imagine who had lived in these structures. I also grew up listening to my grandmother’s stories on her front porch as I helped her snap the green beans or clean the collards that she grew in her side yard. When I heard her describe the family farm back in Mississippi that was lost when a group of white men tricked my great-grandfather — who could not read — into placing his X-mark on a document, and her move north with several children in tow in the 1940s, and the challenges of urban life, I felt the urge to write it all down. I still have the scribbled notes. I was conducting a rudimentary form of oral history, a key method of public history, back then.

Public history has multiple definitions in part because it is a boisterous, crowd-sourced endeavor. The key trait of the field is an engagement with history beyond the walls of the campus or classroom. Because public history meets people where they are and affects how they make sense of their lives, it is a field complicated by public memory, emotional investments, and competing group aims. All of this makes the work thrilling and satisfying, but also vexing, time-intensive, and difficult.

GAZETTE:   What might be surprising to people about public history and how we engage with it?

MILES: Museums, historic sites, archives and libraries, government offices, community organizations, local exhibits, and performances are all common sites of public history. If you frequent these places and find yourself reading plaques, listening to tour guide narratives, or examining images of historical figures, you are engaging with the work product of this field. Most people, though, engage with the past in intimate ways: when they listen to multigenerational family stories around the holiday dinner table, flip through a family photo album, view a historical mural on the wall of a church, or curl up with a work of well-researched historical fiction. These are encounters with the past that can enrich people’s everyday lives, contribute to the shape of personal and community meaning-making, and inspire commitment to civic engagement.

Sometimes critics expect public history to be less thoughtful than historical investigations carried out by academics at universities. This misguided view marginalizes, and indeed disrespects, a wide range of nonacademic knowledge producers and the communities they represent. Intellectuals and researchers outside of universities, including local knowledge holders, oral historians, family historians, historic-site tour guides, and National Park Service interpreters who may not have pursued advanced academic training, create and share knowledge that is essential to the building of multifaceted understandings of the past and to the dissemination of those understandings.

“Sites that mark histories of slavery need to be acknowledged in a way that embraces whole truths to the extent that we can arrive at them and tend with sensitivity to the present needs of people encountering this traumatic past.”

GAZETTE:   You taught a new seminar, “Slavery and Public History,” this spring. What were some themes you focused on?

MILES: I was very pleased to offer this seminar for the first time as part of an effort encouraged by the former chair of the History Department, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, to highlight public scholarship and expand curricular options for our students. We discussed controversial cases of public interpretation of the history of slavery, such as the renovation of the Liberty Bell complex on land where enslaved people once labored in Philadelphia, and the portrayal of a slave auction at Colonial Williamsburg. We delved into the commercialization of plantation landscapes and histories in the form of tourism and wedding planning. We examined fiction, biography, and a range of digital databases and online representations of slavery. Most memorably for the students, we visited the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Mass., and participated in a moving tour with board Co-President Penny Outlaw. Royall family funds were instrumental to the founding of Harvard’s Law School, and imagery from the Royall family coat of arms formerly appeared on the School’s crest.

This class was absolutely invigorating and, incredibly, functioned well even after the COVID-19 disruption. It included a lively, multidisciplinary bunch of brilliant undergraduate and graduate students, as well as fellows from other universities. They researched a range of topics, from the lack of interpretation of Indigenous labor exploitation at a 17th-century Spanish mission and National Historic site in Los Angeles to the complicity of social media platforms in the circulation of racialized stereotypes, such as a TikTok meme in which users are encouraged to mimic the physical stance of a Black person picking cotton.

GAZETTE:   The course ended prior to the start of this protest movement against anti-Black racism and police brutality and a renewed mainstream attention on how this current moment emerged. What have you heard from your students since the protests began?

MILES: They have been sharing feelings of shock and vulnerability as COVID-19 spreads and differentially impacts communities of color, as well as their feelings of increased politicization in response to recent acts of police violence. In our course, we discussed how histories of Black and Indigenous enslavement in what is now the U.S. spawned legacies of inequality that continue today. The students recognize in this moment a meta reflection of issues we discussed: histories of racial oppression, societal avoidance of ugly realities, and the sanitization of national narratives. They do not want to be alone with their troubling realizations. I have been informally encouraging conversations between pairs and groups of students who share questions and research topics in common. As we discussed throughout the semester, the way we work together as learners can also embrace the collaborative methods of public history.

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GAZETTE:   How do current conversations and actions around statues of racist historical figures affect the direction of public history in the U.S.?

MILES: We are currently seeing public history investments and contestations play out writ large in the debate about statues of Confederate generals and other historical figures whose actions have come under fierce criticism. As numerous historians have noted in public venues, these statues say more about the times when they were erected (such as the Jim Crow era) than about the times they purport to reflect (such as the Civil War era). Public history scholarship has again contributed to the conversation, often serving as the source for reexamination of famous figures like South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun and relatively lesser-known figures like Michigan Gov. Lewis Cass. My most recent book, “The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits,” was cited in news coverage about why the present governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, refused to name a new building after Cass and why members of the state legislature want his statue removed from the capitol.

While I have a personal view about problematic statues — no historical representation is sacrosanct; vaunted public symbols should reflect shared public values; statues should be thickly interpreted whether or not they are removed — I believe decisions about each statue should be deliberated at the local level by and with community members who live in the shadows of those landmarks.

GAZETTE:   What needs to change in American public history education for people to really understand and grapple with the legacy of slavery?

MILES: Sites that mark histories of slavery need to be acknowledged in a way that embraces whole truths to the extent that we can arrive at them and tend with sensitivity to the present needs of people encountering this traumatic past. The last decade has ushered in significant change in the interpretation of house museums and agricultural sites, such as the incorporation of enslaved people’s presence in plantation tour narratives, the renovation and interpretation of slave quarters, and the opening of innovative educational sites such as the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana. These gains, while still limited in depth and scope and in need of further development, stem from audience mobilization and public history scholarship that revealed appalling gaps between historical reality and historical presentation and formulated recommendations for conveying fuller renderings of the past.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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A ride across passages of history - Moscow Metro rolls on

Click on the map to enlarge it

Lying at a depth of 5 (Pechatniki station) to 80 metres (Park Pobedy station), the history of the last eight decades unfold before your eyes, carved out of marble and granite and built in iron and glass – revealing the tastes, ideas, dreams, hopes and disappointments of the previous generations and contemporaries. The Moscow Metro dates back to 1931, when its construction first began, although engineers Pyotr Balinsky and Evgeny Knorre submitted their first designs to the Moscow City Duma as far back as 1902. “His speeches carried a strong temptation: like a true demon, he would promise to cast Moscow down to the bottom of the sea and raise it above the clouds”, a journalist for the Russkoye Slovo newspaper commented on Balinsky’s idea. Yet the Duma, made up of rich people, did not bite the bait: after all, they all lived in the centre of the city and never rode overcrowded trams.

After five failed proposals before the Duma, the Moscow Metro finally threw open its doors on May 15, 1935, 18 years after the revolution, and carried the first passengers on its moving staircases, escalators, and the padded seats of its new wagons (unlike the wooden seats in trams). The first metro line – from Sokolniki to Dvorets Sovetov (now known as Kropotkinskaya) -- was 11 km long and had 13 stations. Now, the Moscow Metro has a track of over 300 km with 12 lines and 182 stations. The city’s development outline for 2020 envisages that, by then, another 120 km will have been added to the existing routes.

For the first 20 years of its history, the Moscow Metro was named after Lazar Kaganovich, the “iron commissar” and Stalin’s right hand man, who was in-charge of construction of the first stage of the metro (incidentally, he personally blew up the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in December 1931 as a part of the Proletarian Capital project). In 1955, however, the Metro was renamed after Vladimir Lenin. Although Russia has long since changed its political track, you can still find the images of the former leader at over 10 stations, including, for instance, busts of Lenin at Belorusskaya and Komsomolskaya stations, impressive mosaics at Baumanskaya and Kievskaya stations, a tile panel in the passage between the Borovitskaya and Biblioteka Imeni Lenina stations. By a bitter irony of fate, Lenin’s full-face and side-face images decorate the Tsaritsyno (translated as the Tsarina’s Estate) station (dubbed Lenino up until 1990) – images of the very person who ordered the shooting of the royal family. You will not, however, find any images of Stalin in Moscow’s underground. A symbol of Russia's victory, he was omnipresent in the late 1940s. After his death in 1953 and the denunciation of Stalin’s personality cult, his images were gradually withdrawn from the Moscow Metro.

“Architecture developed along the same lines, both above and below the surface. Anything that emerged above ground had a reflection underground. It is equally true that vice versa never occurred: good architecture underground but bad architecture above the ground,” says Nikolay Shumakov, chief architect of the Moscow Metro. The first metro stations, up until the mid-1950s, were conceived and built as luxurious “palaces for the people”, great architecture for a great state. Art historians insist that the richly-decorated underground was a deliberate ideological move to eulogise the young Soviet country. Stations built between 1937 and 1955 are characteristic of the first architectural period. Everything completed at this time is worthy of special attention. For instance, look at the ceiling at Mayakovskaya and Novokuznetskaya stations to see mosaic panels based on designs by artist Alexander Deineka – 24-Hour Soviet Sky and Heroic Labour of the Soviet People on the Home Front. The mosaics were assembled by famous mosaic artist Vladimir Frolov, author of the mosaic icons in St. Petersburg’s Church of the Saviour on Blood. The Ploshchad Revolutsii station was decorated with 76 bronze sculptures of workers, soldiers, farmers, students and other Soviet people. You can even find a frontier guard with a dog and rub its nose for good luck. You may also note that all the figures (except pioneers) are either sitting or bent, which engendered the sad joke – “Any Soviet man is either in jail or on his knees.”

 Elements of decoration in Moscow's metro.   Photos by Alexandr Ganyushin

1955 heralded the end of the good times for Russian architecture – both underground and above ground – after the Communist Party issued a decree "On elimination of extravagance in design and construction.” Dull stations, without any stucco work, mosaics, original columns or other “unjustified” elements, were built under the slogan “Kilometres at the expense of architecture”. Things were the same above the ground, where entire cities were built of commonplace five-storey apartment blocks, all looking the same, nicknamed ‘Khrushchevkas’ after the then leader, Nikita Khrushchev. To get a sense of this period’s architecture, see the few stations built in the 1960s-1980s like Tverskaya, Kitay-Gorod and Kolomenskaya. In 2002, with the reconstruction of the Vorobyovy Gory station, the development of the Moscow Metro entered a third stage, which could be defined as ‘renaissance’. The platform of the station offers a splendid view of the Moskva River, the Luzhniki Olympic Complex and the Academy of Sciences building. Architectural canons of the 1930s-1940s were once again in use in the design of underground stations. By the same token, artists once again become involved in decorating the stations. As such, the Sretensky Bulvar station boasts silhouettes of Pushkin, Gogol, and Timiryazev and Moscow sights; the Dostoevskaya station is decorated with black-and-white panels featuring the main characters from Dostoyevsky’s novels The Idiot, Demons, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and the Maryina Roshcha station flaunts its pastoral mosaic landscapes. In 2004, Russia's first monorail transport system was launched into service – an elevated track (running 6 to 12 metres above the ground) in the northern part of Moscow, linking the All-Russian Exhibition Centre and the Timiryazevskaya metro station. The evolution of the Moscow Metro goes on. It’s still a work in progress, with ambitious plans to move the Moscow Metro even closer to passengers over the next ten years, not just by adding an extra 120 km to its total track. “We want to strip the stations of everything we can,” says Nikolai Shumakov. “We are trying to show the passengers their very framework, what the metro is made of. Cast iron and concrete are beautiful.”

Joy ride: Read Gogol, Dante or savour art

The Aquarelle Train.   Source: Reuters/Vostock-Photo

With any luck, you can ride in a retro train, a moving art gallery or a library. The trains are actually a part of the general traffic (i.e., they do not run to any special schedule) and are used on certain lines. The Reading Moscow Train , an ordinary train on the face of it, features extracts from literary works for adults and children. Each wagon has its own selection, from children’s fairy tales to Gogol. Circle Line. The Poetry in Metro Train carries an exposition, updated this year, dedicated to Italian poets Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, Giacomo Leopardi, etc. All the poems are featured in two languages, Russian and Italian. Filevskaya Line. The Sokolniki Retro Train looks exactly like the first Moscow Metro train, both inside and out. Painted brown, it has padded seats, typical wall decorations and retro lamps. Sokolnicheskaya Line. The Aquarelle Train looks like a cabinet painted with flowers and fruit on the outside. Inside, it is an art gallery featuring art reproductions from the Vyatka Apollinary and Viktor Vasnetsov Art Museum. Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya Line.

Revolution Square station (built in 1938) is close to the Red Square area. There are 72 sculptures in the station, depicting the people of the Soviet Union, including soldiers, farmers, athletes, writers, industrial workers and school children.

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17 Public History, Cultural Institutions, and National Identity: Dialogues about Difference

Jannelle Warren-Findley was a professor emerita of history at Arizona State University. Her publications include Human Heritage Management in New Zealand in the Year 2000 and Beyond, which won the Michael Robinson Award of the National Council on Public History. She was a president of the National Council on Public History. In 2015, she was honored posthumously by NCPH with the Robert Kelley Award for distinguished service to the field of public history.

• Published: 05 October 2017
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Public surveys in Anglophone countries suggest that many individuals learn most of their history from family or cultural institutions, rather than from reading scholarship or sitting in classrooms. As histories of silenced groups, forgotten tribes, and ignored communities gain a place in the contemporary narrative of national histories, we must explore the methods and assumptions used by those who created the intellectual and legal frameworks that determine who in the past were represented as historical players and why others were not. Analyzing public policy documents can help us understand the cultural assumptions underlying historic preservation decisions. Modifying or rethinking those assumptions entirely can permit us to “dialogue across difference” and work for inclusive cultural identities in our public places.

Public historians who work in cultural institutions around the world—museums, parks, archives, libraries, planning bureaucracies, funding agencies, and others—find themselves faced with defining “national identity” in a global setting of increased diversity. The human rights activist Liz Ševčenko describes how such agencies address identity and change in the contemporary world: we dialogue across difference. 1 Where stories of outsiders in culture were once silenced from the metanarrative of national identity, cultural institutions now focus increasingly on the differences between cultures and their complex struggles to live, work, love, and die in often shared spaces and places to which they have migrated or sought refuge. For example, the Australian museologist Kylie Message points out that the National Museum of Australia, designed to be “self-consciously postmodern, postcolonialist and pluralist in outlook,” grew out of an intellectual framework that sought “to represent identity as unfinished and contested, contingent and continuously negotiated, national identity was represented as a work in progress to which museum audiences were encouraged to contribute. The contributions of audiences and constituents were enabled on the basis that the museum would function as a public forum that aimed to ‘speak with many voices, listen and respond to all, and promote debate and discussion about questions of diversity and identity.’ ” 2

Contemporary explanations confront multiple stories, contradictory memories, and the larger fact that when groups moved from subaltern status into the history, politics, and cultural explanations in history museums and parks, the traditional historical master narrative was disrupted, and heritage dissonance—“the selectivity with which heritage is marked and used in tourism: notably to reflect back to visitors their own heritage rather than to reflect the heritage perceptions of local residents”—occurred. 3 David Neufeld describes a Parks Canada project in which oral historians queried local First Nation tribes about the effect of the Gold Rush. The local inhabitants noticed little, and the Anglo rush for riches had a limited effect, it turned out, just “a wild weekend party that came and, thankfully, went.” 4 The story of the Gold Rush in Canada was, for tribes, a passing invasion noted, if at all, in a completely different but parallel set of stories of that place. That finding proved a surprise to the researchers.

A similar surprise arose in a brief study of the U.S. Park Service’s Manassas National Battlefield Park, an American Civil War site, which found that the battle took place in an area that was home primarily to a community of free blacks, which the Civil War blew through in 1861 and again in 1862 but otherwise made little disruptive physical difference to their lives in that landscape. Their stories about the community were the stories that mattered to the inhabitants, but not necessarily at all to the dominant culture who now reenact and celebrate the two battles as if they are the only stories of the place. 5

If such tales of cultures side by side but hardly linked are to be made more layered and connected, public historians will need to ask new questions and think about the responses carefully. Michael Rothberg claims that one of the “most agonizing” questions of contemporary life in multicultural societies is “how to think about different groups’ histories of victimization.” Is competition necessary among groups and their stories? Is the notion of “multidirectional” memory as a way of understanding collective memories useful to public historians who work with disparate narratives in public places? 6 This chapter explores the history of public history practice in the United States and the ways that the rethinking and reshaping of academic theory and practice in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States accompanied a linked set of changes in cultural institutions where professional historians practiced. That series of developments then frames a comparison of how other countries explored similar issues and new approaches to old stories.

One of the major areas in which new ways of viewing historical narratives could be found was in the definition, description, analysis, and interpretation of the notion of national identity that emerged in the period from a number of intellectual disciplines, including history, anthropology and archeology, geography, and sociology. The questions that arose from such a reworking of the concept are those of both content and context: Whose national story was told in a national museum? What role might such an institution play in both the creating of dissonance and/or the achievement of unity in diversity? What official and informal roles can such public agencies play in shaping or reshaping culture? How might they help to redefine national identity to be both multicultural and highly valued by the diverse communities represented therein? As Ann Rigney says in considering European efforts, can memory be “an imaginative resource that can be shared, rather than . . . a fixed legacy that is inherited or owned by particular groups in an exclusive way?” 7 The institutions discussed here are, for the most part, historical or cultural park systems. They have received less attention from scholars involved in unpacking multicultural stories in public history venues than museums, 8 but they function much the same way, albeit with larger forms of material culture and more attention paid to cultural landscapes.

Public History Practice in the United States

Public history is the rigorous research, analysis, and interpretation of history engaged in by professional historians and other interdisciplinary scholars for a variety of audiences in cultural institutions and the academy around the world. Public historians present interdisciplinary scholarship to diverse visitors—varied by class, race, gender, tribe, nationality, religion, language, education level, sense of place, expectations, and uses of memory—audiences whose notions of history and the meanings and insights of the humanities may differ profoundly from one another. Underlying the public practice of history are questions such as: Who owns history? What are community, multidirectional memory, history, and/or culture? What is sustainable or negotiable in each of these areas? These public ways of doing history are often about power and place at the community level, but they are similar to global questions and must be addressed from the local to the broadly international level. 9 Their narratives can create new models and definitions of national identity.

Public history, the U.S. term for applied historical practice or the work of professional historians outside traditional classrooms, began self-consciously to assert its place in cultural institutions in the mid-1980s, about half a decade after its formal founding as an academically based movement in the United States. The movement’s origins lay in the university employment crisis of the 1970s and the need to secure employment for a generation of recent recipients of PhDs in history. The initial focus of the field aimed primarily at applied historical work in policy making and research, particularly for government agencies and legal and judicial activities. 10 Historians and other humanities-based scholars who worked outside the academy but not in those areas often identified more with the work they did than their disciplinary origins: trained historians could become curators, park historians, historic preservationists, cultural resources managers, archivists, librarians, or oral historians.

Intellectual and pragmatic changes in the 1980s led to more interest in cultural institutions. 11 This was undoubtedly a result of the social history and cultural turns in academic attention as well as increased notice paid to scholarship as major agencies such as the National Park Service professionalized their cultural and natural resources staff. The policy-focused contingent soon was joined by scholars whose academic work and public activity merged in social action and social justice undertakings of various sorts. As Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen pointed out,

Carried along by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many advocates of people’s history and public history saw the past as a source of empowerment and political mobilization. They wanted to democratize not just the content of history (adding the stories of African Americans, industrial workers, immigrants, women, and gays) but also its practice; they wanted to turn audiences into collaborators. In the 1970s and 1980s some of us had begun collaborating with new audiences through museums and state humanities councils, historical films, community oral history programs, and trade union historical classes. 12

New questions formed: How does the scholar find the narratives of those not included in official archives or libraries? How can those stories be shared with the general public in a place? Public historians involved in this social history movement eschewed policy making for teaching in public places, and the attention of the larger profession turned to the examination of what history was being presented by whom and to whom in museums, national parks, zoological parks, arboretums, historic preservation sites, and libraries and archives where history is exhibited or presented in some way to the public.

Cultural Institutions, Cultural Dialogues

By the late 1980s, government funding through national government agencies in the United States such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution, and private foundations made it possible for scholars from the academy and from public organizations to consider together how best to reshape these public history places to serve a new agenda: explorations of diversity, migration, ethnicity, cultural geography and landscapes, environmental issues, folklore, and archeological information about places and peoples. Conferences that examined new questions, new approaches, and new ways of thinking about culture were held in the late 1980s at the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and many other places. 13 There, the notion of “histories” as a way to talk about contemporary nation-states developed a following. The participants came from a global professional context so that discussions were not limited to local or national issues, a new development for practice in the United States. In Australia, in 1999, the new National Museum of Australia sponsored an international discussion of national museums and national identity. 14

Another means of examining complex histories, using “place” as the controlling image, arose out of the disciplines of cultural geography and anthropology/archaeology. Beginning in the late 1970s, the concept of “cultural landscapes” became central to discussions of the built environment because it was more inclusive, allowing the discovery and interpretation of all the histories in a particular place. Moreover, the cultural landscape idea allowed for the inclusion of land that was undisturbed yet important to groups who lived in the place, and it fostered practice that encompassed both natural and cultural resources. In the late 1980s, the Office of Technology Assessment (a Congressional think tank) recommended to the National Park Service that, among other things, the agency add the notion of cultural landscapes to the eligible landscape categories to be nominated to the National Register of Historic Places. That change allowed for the inclusion of sacred, undisturbed Native American sites, should tribes want them included, as well as less-traditionally noticed landscape designs from many ethnic groups, such as Japanese American bathhouses in the Pacific Northwest. 15 The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress developed a series of studies during this same period that examined groups of residents in carefully defined areas so as to obtain a multilayered understanding of the interrelationships of place and culture. 16

Michael Frisch, in his seminal work A Shared Authority , 17 explored the deeper questions and interdisciplinary takings into history of not only social history theory and interpretations but also literary theory, cultural anthropology, cultural geography, folklore, and other fields and disciplines. In considering the role of oral and public history in history making more generally, Frisch also began to dismantle the wall between the history studied, written, and taught by academics and the history studied, written, and taught in public institutions by professional historians working outside the university setting. He noted that the sources for filling the silences described and analyzed brilliantly by Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his study of the Haitian revolution, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History , 18 lay in interrogating narratives concerned with race, class, gender, and other previously less explored areas of historical study. Those often could be found only using different research techniques: learning to create an oral history in collaboration with the interviewee ; learning to understand and interpret material culture; learning to interact with empathy and deep understanding with individuals of a cultural group different from one’s own. And Frisch foresaw one of the real dilemmas of public historical work: the need to understand that cultural informants are equal partners in intellectual endeavors because their knowledge and experience, their cultural membership, makes them experts and they must be recognized as such. That challenge to the authority of scholars and scholarship would pervade explanations for the next thirty years, proving vital to changes in the way public historians think about practice in cultural institutions. Whether and how practice changed in that period is another question.

The Public Surveys and the Finding of Political Meaning

In the late 1980s, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen noted that historians engaged in work in the “New Social History” tended to focus on the ways that history was presented to popular audiences but had little understanding of how those audiences understood, made use of, or connected to the history they read, watched on television, listened to on the radio, or viewed in exhibits and at historic sites. 19 An experimental effort by Thelen with public history graduate students at Arizona State University revealed key issues for any attempt to engage the public broadly:

The conversations reported by these students convinced us that we needed to pay attention to how we introduced our topic. History is the word that scholars privilege to describe how they approach the past. But in Phoenix history conjured up something done by famous people that others studied in school; respondents said history was formal, analytical, official, or distant. Words like heritage and tradition conjured up warm and fuzzy feelings but not very rich experience or sharp observation. The past was the term that best invited people to talk about family, race, and nation, about where they had come from and what they had learned along the way. Trust was the concept that best captured how people viewed sources of information about the past. And the metaphor that best captured what mattered to them in the past could be elicited by the concept of connection . To which pasts did they feel most connected? 20

Rosenzweig and Thelen proceeded to raise funding for and execute a project that surveyed a cross-section of Americans about their responses to the past. They found great interest in, connection to, and reverence for the past among their sample, with relatively little enthusiasm for the history created and taught by teachers and professionals. They were told, as were Australian researchers and then Canadian surveyors a few years later, that family history and historical narratives play a central role in peoples’ understanding and uses of the past. Cultural institutions, particularly museums and historical sites, proved to be trustworthy carriers of historical consciousness and memory. Video presentations such as photographs or documentaries appeared to be reliable accounts of heritage matters; films and television shows as well as historical fiction tended to be less trustworthy.

Similar findings appeared in a survey initiated by Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton in Australia. 21 As they point out, “What has changed, from the 1960s, is that historians are being forced to recognize the legitimacy of people as makers of history who have been the subjects of history.” 22 Jannelle Warren-Findley, in comparing the U.S. and Australian findings, observes that the need and desire to construct a bridge between professional historians and their audiences is not new; what is different is the idea that the people on the other end of the bridge have their own notions and uses of the past and are not necessarily welcoming of historical authorities who do not come from their family, community, or tribe. 23 Thelen notes in his conclusion to his U.S. study,

The “history wars” of recent years have subverted the development of a healthy, participatory, fundamentally historical culture because they have politicized history as a struggle among claims to authority [italics added]. In the debate over the National Air and Space Museum’s proposed exhibit on the Enola Gay, for example, people were asked to choose between the authenticity of a pilot’s memories of wartime service and the accuracy of written sources recovered by a historian. In a fundamentally historical culture, both would be respected and treated for what they are: different uses of the past introducing different perspectives and different individual voices. 24

A group of Canadian historians did a survey for “Canadians and Their Pasts.” 25 They also found that the intersection between lived experience that becomes historical and professional historical practice is subject to politicization. The findings from the American survey showed where the bridge between professional history making and popular uses of the past landed on the far shore, but included little real information about how to cross for either the scholars who originally asked the questions or the people surveyed. As the scholars who studied the uses of history in Canada noted, in speaking to the limits of surveys, “they . . . offer compelling evidence that people orient themselves to the past in a variety of ways and that academic understandings of the past often compete for acceptance with narratives derived from locations outside of the academy.” 26

Changes in Approach

The materiality of tangible or, to a lesser extent, intangible cultural items often defines both the theoretical and the practical or applied rule of heritage matters. Whereas G .J. Ashworth and J. E. Tunbridge note that the definition of “heritage” is itself contested between the stuff and the meaning of the stuff, many historic preservationists or heritage managers do not ask specifically either about theory or about meaning. 27 The answer to the “so what” question—we’ve saved this building, but so what?—is more assumed than analyzed. The applied meanings of cultural construction reside within this process. That is true because the established rules in heritage conservation or historic preservation are critical to defining what can be saved in any country with a nomination and selection process. Looking at Anglophone countries with a shared legal and cultural skeleton derived from English common law is instructive not only in regard to basic assumptions about what is important and what is not (by omission) but also in regard to what point in time the criteria lists were created. The assumptions appear to arise not out of a sense of national identity per se, but from the professional knowledge and expectations of those who create the lists and the political and intellectual frameworks within which they were working at that point in time. The relationship between heritage and identity becomes even more complex as populations grow more diverse. That complexity, in turn, is reflected in the frameworks established in various countries for heritage preservation.

Comparing the regulations in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom allows us to trace changes in populations and landscapes and the awareness of both on a national level. In all three countries, the process of maintaining historic sites and structures originates in the English National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, established in 1894. The first of the state-based Australian National Trusts, that of New South Wales, was formed in 1947. The U.S. version, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, was chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1949 as a private, nonprofit organization. Initially, the Australian and U.S. institutions modeled themselves after the English National Trust. The sociologist Diane Bartels, in comparing the English and U.S. trusts, points out that “historic preservation is part of a larger consciousness, which includes efforts to preserve art and manuscripts, antiquities, monuments of every sort from cemeteries and battlefields, and also includes the interest in wilderness preservation that led to the National Parks movement in America and countryside preservation in Great Britain.” 28

In all three countries, however, far more important than the shared legal and cultural skeleton in shaping cultural meaning has been each government’s assumption of responsibility for heritage conservation or cultural resource management. Construction of culture thus became a deliberate act through law, although that was not the stated purpose of shaping criteria and definitions of significance. In the United States, the National Park Service had long played a role in conserving historic sites, structures, and landscapes; it became the lead agency of government for such undertakings with the passage of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act. On the state level, most states have a state park system. In Arizona, for example, such entities are managed by Arizona State Parks in the executive branch of the state government. 29 In Australia, Commonwealth places are managed by Parks Australia, located in the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities. Individual Australian states have their own systems of management. In New South Wales, for example, such work is undertaken by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. That organization is part of the Office of Environment and Heritage, which can be found within the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet. 30 English Heritage (or the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England) is a nondepartmental public body connected to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. It was established under the National Heritage Act, 1983. 31

This is where the regulations laid out for nomination to the U.S. National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places become critical. Criteria for nomination include integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association, and the priorities are sites, structures, or landscapes:

That are associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history;

That are associated with the lives of persons significant in our past;

That embody distinctive characteristics of a type, period, method of construction, or that represent the work of a master, or that possess high artistic values, or that represent a significant or distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual distinction; or

That have yielded, or may be likely to yield, information important in history or prehistory. 32

These criteria were established in the late 1960s by a group of National Park Service employees, archaeologists, professional architects, and one historian with a PhD and were based largely but not solely on architectural characteristics. They have important resonance because the U.S. National Park Service is the lead agency of government for historic preservation, and the national preservation program that extends into state and local jurisdictions is regulated by the service. Thus, in a sense, historic preservation in the United States comes by its particular conservation ethic because of the questions asked of the material culture rather than questions asked about meaning. History becomes description rather than interpretation, and evaluation is based primarily on the notion of significance of material and secondarily on significance of meaning. These criteria apply only to the outside of buildings, structures, and other forms of tangible culture. This whole structure of law and regulation would have to change to shift the focus to the meaning of material culture. 33

In contrast, Australia’s national heritage list offers more possibilities to untangle meaning from material. Its two primary bases for cultural, historical, or natural value evaluation are “criteria” and “thresholds.” The Australian National Heritage criteria against which the heritage values of a place are assessed include the following areas:

The place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s importance in the course, or pattern, of Australia’s natural or cultural history;

The place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s possession of uncommon, rare or endangered aspects of Australia’s natural or cultural history;

The place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s potential to yield information that will contribute to an understanding of Australia’s natural or cultural history;

The place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s importance in demonstrating the principal characteristics of:

A class of Australia’s natural or cultural places; or

A class of Australia’s natural or cultural environments;

The place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s importance in exhibiting particular aesthetic characteristics valued by a community or cultural group;

The place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s importance in demonstrating a high degree of creative or technical achievement at a particular period;

The place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s strong or special association with a particular community or cultural group for social, cultural or spiritual reasons;

The place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s special association with the life or works of a person, or group of persons, of importance in Australia’s natural or cultural history;

The place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s importance as part of indigenous tradition.

Note: The cultural aspect of a criterion means the indigenous cultural aspect, the non-indigenous cultural aspect, or both. 34

Events, lives, and potential information (a criterion that applies primarily to archaeological sites in the United States) are no more than general categories for the American nomination process; only elements of design and construction or the aesthetic impact of sites, structures, or landscapes are laid out in any detail. The Australian criteria, written in the 1980s, include all of the above. The approach, however, is more multicultural with concerns like “strong or special association with a particular community or cultural group for social, cultural or spiritual reasons” or “importance in exhibiting particular aesthetic characteristics valued by a community or cultural group.” Specifically, indigenous groups appear in the original list, as opposed to in amendments later as in the United States. As the list says, “importance as part of indigenous tradition” is an included aspect of the larger national history of Australia. A note at the end of the list (which might better serve the user if it were at the beginning) makes the definition clear: “Note: The cultural aspect of a criterion means the indigenous cultural aspect, the non-indigenous cultural aspect, or both.” That comment is important in its attempt to call nonindigenous and indigenous heritage conservation by the same categorical name, rather than “historic heritage” for the English tradition and “cultural heritage” for the indigenous tradition, as the naming works in New Zealand. 35 Both countries use the categories of assessment along with a second step of evaluating the importance to local, state, or national populations of the particular place or property.

English Heritage, however, proceeded to examine all aspects of the sector, when tasked by the secretaries of state for culture, media and sport, on the one hand, and environment, transport and the regions, on the other, to review all aspects of its approach to the historic environment and heritage conservation in the year 2000. This effort paralleled the conferences to rethink cultural representation held by museum specialists in the 1980s and 1990s; it was perceived as “a once in a generation opportunity.” 36 Hundreds of people, experts and laypeople, were involved in this evaluation. The major findings included a high level of support among the population generally for protection of the historic environment, akin to the survey findings in the United States, Australia, and Canada. Participants felt that all cultures should be recognized in the process, and people want to be involved in the process of identifying and protecting historic places. Sir Neal Cossins, the chairman of the Historic Environment Review Steering Group, observed that “the historic environment is seen by most people as a totality.” Respondents consider the whole of the historic environment significant, not just individual sites or buildings. Finally, the concluding finding lays out a generous take on cultural construction and management: “Everything rests on sound knowledge and understanding. Good history is history that is based in thorough research and is tested and refined through open debate. It accommodates multiple narratives and takes account of the values people place on their surroundings.” 37

The assumption made here by English Heritage about the built environment and its relationship to those who live within and use it—that the history practiced by researchers and scholars can organically be combined with the “multiple narratives and values” of people—is different from what James B. Gardner argued, in his important National Council on Public History presidential address from 2004, has been the unfortunate reality. Gardner maintained that findings where people locate and value history in museums and historic sites is not good news for historians or public historians, because the public believes that they encounter an unmediated and uninterpreted past: “The past that Rosenzweig and Thelen [or, presumably, Ashton and Hamilton or the English Heritage surveyors] find the public engaged in is fundamentally different from the history to which we are so committed . . . more about commemoration, nostalgia and life-coping skills than meaning or complexity. That’s a fundamentally different sense of the past than what we as public historians are committed to exploring and sharing, and it challenges the viability of our work.” 38 Instead of organically linked, historians and the public are too often going in very different directions.

English Heritage is far more sanguine about the public: “Power of Place” points out that “virtually everyone in England—some 98 percent—believe that the historic environment is a vital educational asset, a means for the understanding of history and of their origins and identity. It is the most accessible of historical texts.” 39 As Gardner notes, however, this view of historic preservation as text does not consider who might write or have written that text and whose stories might be selected to be included there—giving voice to one “community” might exclude another, overlapping one. Clearly, the accessibility of the built environment must be framed with analysis and interpretation to layer and complicate “a means for the understanding of history and of their origins and identity.” 40

The study of these cultural skeletons of law and regulation concerned with history and culture has barely begun, so the issues of who literally constructs the cultural rules, from what point of view, and to what end are not yet clear. The national surveys help pinpoint where the audience for tangible and intangible history is and what some of their expectations of history are. As more national surveys are taken, particularly beyond the English colonial cultural and legal map, the information located should help professional historians understand where the dialogue must begin. New analytic works like Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native Americans in National and Tribal Museums by the Ho-Chunk scholar Amy Lonetree 41 argue strongly for the critical inclusion of silenced stories in all areas of historical work. However, these criteria lists do reflect intellectual developments in public history theory and practice during the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Moreover, the more recently developed lists clearly accept the notion that national identity in a global world is multifaceted, diverse, and in need of redefinition and that indigenous people, subaltern groups, and those rediscovered by social history students are and must be a part of the whole historic environment. Theoretically, the approaches of cultural institutions concerned with complicated layers of national identity are now remade. How they are applied in public history practice will be the next set of questions for scholars and the public to examine and perhaps shape together.

1. Liz Ševčenko , “A Decade of Dialogue at Sites of Conscience,” Public History News , 30, no. 4 (September 2010): 1 , and many other discussions of the way that sites of conscience present historical stories.

2. Kylie Message , “Culture, Citizenship and Australian Multiculturalism: The Contest over Identity Formation at the National Museum of Australia,” Humanities Research 40, no. 2 (2009): 23–48, http://epress.anu.edu.au/hrj/2009_02/mobile_devices/ch04.html .

3. Gregory John Ashworth and J. E. Tunbridge , The Tourist-Historic City , (London: Belhaven Press, 1990), 68 , cited in Nikolas Glover , “Co-Produced Histories: Mapping the Uses and Narratives of History in the Tourist Age,” The Public Historian 30, no. 1 (February 2008): 114 .

4. David Neufeld , “Ethics in the Practice of Public History with Aboriginal Communities,” The Public Historian 28, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 119 .

Jannelle Warren-Findley, “Survey of Additional Lands at Manassas National Battlefield Park,” 1986, Records of the National Park Service, National Archives and Records Administration.

6. Michael Rothberg , Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 2 and passim.

7. Ann Rigney , “Transforming Memory and the European Project,” New Literary History 43 (2012): 610 .

There is no “new park narrative” movement analogous to the “new museology,” although there are new ways of telling multiple stories in parks.

9. The history of public history can be found in publications like Paul Ashton and Hilda Kean , eds., People and Their Pasts: Public History Today (New York: Routledge, 2009) ; Rebecca Conard , Benjamin Shambaugh and the Intellectual Foundations of Public History (Ames: University of Iowa Press, 2001) ; James B. Gardner and Peter LaPaglia , Public History: Essays from the Field , rev. ed. (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 2004) ; and Ian Tyrrell , Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) . Volumes of The Public Historian , published by the University of California Press, cover many aspects of the field from a range of viewpoints.

10. See, for example, Richard Neustadt and Ernest May , Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: Free Press, 1988) ; also Richard W. Leopold , “The Historian and the Federal Government,” Journal of American History 64, no. 1 (June 1977): 5–23 .

11. See Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig , eds., History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989) as an example.

12. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen , The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 4 .

13. See Ivan Karp , Christine Mullen Kreamer , and Steven Lavine , eds., Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1992) ; Steven D. Lavine , Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books: 1991) ; and Mary Hufford , ed., Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994) .

14. Darryl McIntyre and Kirsten Wehner , eds., National Museums: Negotiating Histories (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2001) .

15. See OTA-E-319 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1986); OTA-BP-E-44 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, July 1987); and OTA-BP-E-37 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1987). See Gail Dubrow with Donna Graves , Sento at Sixth and Main (Seattle: Seattle Arts Commission, distributed by the University of Washington Press, 2002) .

16. For example, Mary Hufford , One Space, Many Places: Folklife and Land Use in New Jersey’s Pinelands National Reserve (Washington, DC: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1986) .

17. Michael Frisch , A Shared Authority: Essays on Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990) .

18. Michel-Rolph Trouillot , Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997) .

Rosenzweig and Thelen, The Presence of the Past , 4–5.

20. Ibid ., 6.

21. Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton , History at the Crossroads: Australians and the Past (Ultimo, New South Wales: Halstead Press, 2010) .

22. Ibid ., 24.

23. Jannelle Warren-Findley , “History in New Worlds: Surveys and Results in the United States and Australia,” Australian Cultural History 23 (2003): 43–52 .

24. Thelen , “Afterthoughts: A Participatory Historical Culture,” in The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life , ed. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 190 .

25. The Canadians situated their survey in the theoretical work of Jorn Rusen, Pierre Nora, Peter Lee, and James Wertsch. They also remind us that an earlier survey, taken by European historians at the time of regime change in Soviet Union and development and expansion of the European Union, predated these later efforts. See Margaret Conrad , Jocelyn LeTourneau , and David Northrup , “Canadians and Their Pasts: An Exploration in Historical Consciousness,” The Public Historian 31, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 17–19 .

26. Margaret Conrad , Jocelyn LeTourneau , and David Northrup , “Canadians and Their Pasts: An Exploration in Historical Consciousness,” The Public Historian 31, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 16 ; Victoria Harden, quoted in Jannelle Warren-Findley , “History in New Worlds: Surveys and Results in the United States and Australia,” Australian Cultural History 23 (2003): 43–52 ; Warren-Findley, ibid .

27. Gregory John Ashworth and J. E. Tunbridge , The Tourist-Historic City , (London: Belhaven Press, 1990), 68 , cited in Nikolas Glover , “Co-Produced Histories: Mapping the Uses and Narratives of History in the Tourist Age,” The Public Historian 30, no. 1 (February 2008): 114 . The most recent exception is a collection of essays edited by Max Page and Randy Mason , Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2003) .

28. Diane Bartel , “Historic Preservation: A Comparative Analyses,” Sociological Forum 4, no. 1 (March 1989): 88–95 .

On the U.S. National Park Service, see The National Historic Preservation Act and The National Park Service: A History , https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/mackintosh5/preface.htm ; for Arizona State Parks, see Arizona State Parks and Trails , http://www.azstateparks.com .

On Parks Australia, see Parks Australia: Protecting Australia’s natural and cultural heritage   https://parksaustralia.gov.au/ ; for New South Wales, see NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service   http://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/ .

See English Heritage , http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/ .

“Heritage” is a charged word in the United States. For some, it refers to patriotic calls to protect “our heritage” during the Cold War period.

34. Australian Heritage Council, Australian Government, Guidelines for the Assessment of Places for the National Heritage List (Canberra: Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, 2009), 5–7 .

35. Jannelle Warren-Findley , Human Heritage Management in New Zealand in the Year 2000 and Beyond (Wellington, New Zealand: Ian Axford New Zealand Fellowship in Public Policy, 2001) .

36. The Power of Place: The Future of the Historic Environment (London: Power of Place Office, 2000) .

37. Ibid ., “Introduction.”

38. James B. Gardner , “Contested Terrain: History, Museums and the Public,” The Public Historian 26, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 13 .

39. Chapter 1i , The Power of Place: The Future of the Historic Environment (London: Power of Place Office, 2000) .

41. Amy Lonetree , Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native Americans in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) .

Ashton, Paul , and Hilda Kean , eds. People and Their Pasts: Public History Today. London: Routledge, 2009 .

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Ashton, Paul , and Paula Hamilton . History at the Crossroads: Australians and the Past. Ultimo, New South Wales: Halstead Press, 2010 .

Australian Government. “Australian Heritage Information.” http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/info/index.html .

Bartel, Diane. “ Historic Preservation: A Comparative Analyses. ” Sociological Forum 4, no. 1 (March 1989): 88–95.

Conard, Rebecca.   Benjamin Shambaugh and the Intellectual Foundations of Public History. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001 .

Conrad, Margaret , Jocelyn LeTourneau , and David Northrup . “ Canadians and Their Pasts: An Exploration in Historical Consciousness. ” The Public Historian 31, no. 1 (Winter 2009 ): 17–19.

English Heritage. “ The Power of Place: The Future of the Historic Environment. ” London: English Heritage, 2000 . http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/power-of-place/ .

Frisch, Michael.   A Shared Authority: Essays on Oral and Public History . Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990 .

Gardner, James B. “ Contested Terrain: History, Museums and the Public. ” The Public Historian 26, no. 4 (Fall 2004 ): 11–21.

Gardner, James B. , and Peter LaPaglia , eds. Public History: Essays from the Field , rev. ed. Malabar, FL: Krieger, 2004 .

Glover, Nikolas. “ Co-Produced Histories: Mapping the Uses and Narratives of History in the Tourist Age. ” The Public Historian 30, no. 1 (February 2008): 105–124.

Hufford, Mary.   One Space, Many Places: Folklife and Land Use in New Jersey’s Pinelands National Reserve. Washington, DC: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1986 .

Hufford, Mary , ed. Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994 .

Karp, Ivan , Christine Kraemer , and Stephen D. Lavine , eds. Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1992 .

Lavine, Stephen D.   Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display . Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1991 .

Leon, Warren , and Roy Rosenzweig , eds. History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989 .

Lonetree, Amy.   Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native Americans in National and Tribal Museums. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012 .

McIntyre, Darryl , and Kirsten Wehner , eds. National Museums: Negotiating Histories . Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2001 .

Message, Kylie. “ Culture, Citizenship and Australian Multiculturalism: The Contest over Identity Formation at the National Museum of Australia. ” Humanities Research 40, no. 2 ( 2009 ): 23–48. http://epress.anu.edu.au/hrj/2009_02/mobile_devices/ch04.html .

Murtagh, William J.   Keeping Time: The History and Theory of Preservation in America , rev. ed. Pittstown, NJ: Main Street Press, 1997 .

Neufeld, David. “ Ethics in the Practice of Public History with Aboriginal Communities. ” The Public Historian 28, no. 1 (Winter 2006 ): 117–121.

Page, Max , and Randy Mason . Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States. London: Routledge, 2003 .

Rigney, Ann. “ Transforming Memory and the European Project. ” New Literary History 43, no. 4 (Autumn 2012 ): 607–628.

Rosenzweig, Roy , and David Thelen . The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000 .

Rothberg, Michael.   Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009 .

Sevcenko, Liz. “ A Decade of Dialogue at Sites of Conscience. ” Public History News 30, no. 4 (September 2010): 1.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph.   Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997 .

Tyrrell, Ian.   Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 .

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Warren-Findley, Jannelle.   Human Heritage Management in New Zealand in the Year 2000 and Beyond . Wellington, New Zealand: Ian Axford New Zealand Fellowship in Public Policy, 2001 .

Warren-Findley, Jannelle. “ History in New Worlds: Surveys and Results in the United States and Australia. ” Australian Cultural History 23 ( 2003 ): 43–52.

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Visual culture and the Moscow Metro

James Andrews first rode the Moscow Metro in the 1980s as an undergraduate student studying in the former Soviet Union.

Now after 35 years, the metro is taking him on a new journey: documenting how its iconic public spaces reveal the story of Moscow itself as the city evolved under Joseph Stalin and his Soviet and post-Soviet successors.

This May, Andrews, professor of history, gave a public lecture on his new research project at the Kennan Institute in Washington, D.C. The Kennan Institute is part of the Woodrow Wilson Center, where Andrews was a former senior resident fellow.

The talk, which has been made available on YouTube, was so well-received that Andrews immediately received an additional invitation to present at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University.

What makes the Moscow Metro a fascinating subject for a historian? More people ride the Moscow Metro each day than the New York City Subway and London Tube combined, yet its history is relatively unknown, Andrews said.

“Everyone has a story about the metro, but there has never been a book in English about its history,” Andrews said. “Many of my generation spent an endless amount of time on the metro. Before people had cell phones, you would always say, ‘Well, we’ll meet on the platform at this station.’ Everyone spent time traveling through this cavernous system. It’s a labyrinth really, but at the same time people don’t know much about its history in detail.”

Andrews’ previous books focus on the history of Russian science, technology and the Soviet space program. His new book project on the metro is another opportunity to study iconic Soviet technology, as well as visual culture.

The original metro stations, built with deep shaft tunneling methods beginning in 1932, had airy open ceilings with gorgeous bas-relief architecture—a canvas that Stalin used to create a public art monument to socialism.

“Socialist countries had a tendency to produce technologies that they could adorn with stories,” Andrews said. “Their metro was started in the 1930s under Stalin, and they invested a lot of money in it. It was important for two reasons: there was a utilitarian nature. The crowds were incredible in Moscow. They needed better public transportation. People had been flooding in from the countryside during collectivization. The other thing was to come up with a monument to socialism. That’s why they hired all these architects to decorate, and they decorated each station thematically.”

In the years after Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev issued an edict rejecting the metro’s flamboyant architectural style in favor of a pre-fabricated, practical style, Andrews said. At the same time all over the city, de-Stalinization was happening, and street signs, busts of Stalin and station names were changed or removed.

“The irony is Stalin funded it,” Andrews said. “It’s a Stalin-era display technology project, but by the Khrushchev era they were erasing Stalin’s name from it.”

Andrews has had unlimited access to Moscow’s architectural archives, including many original photographic negatives, and will return to Russia next summer to research political archives.

“The Bolsheviks liked to document everything, but I was shocked at how many photographs they had taken of all these projects, documenting every stage and how well they were preserved,” he said.

Throughout his research, he has uncovered more stories hidden within familiar metro spaces.

One Russian architectural archivist told Andrews about being born in the metro in 1942, during a time when its underground stations housed makeshift hospitals, military meetings and even cultural events such as film nights.

Public spaces bear new stories over time, and Andrews is closely following the story told by newly constructed metro stations. New stations are bringing back marble-laden aesthetics and cultural themes that highlight famous Russian figures like chemist Dmitri Mendeleev or writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, he said.

“I think the story tells us now that during Putin’s era you see a resurgence of Russian nationalism and Russian themes,” he said. “Not every station can be imploded into this reductive narrative, but it points again to how the narrative of the metro stations changes as the politics of Russian change to some extent and the city itself.”

And it shows how the Moscow Metro has a seemingly endless amount of track for a historian to travel.

“What I love about the project is there is a political history to it, a technological history, a social history, an engineering element, and an artistic element,” Andrews said. “It’s a multi-disciplinary study, which is both fascinating to me and challenging.”

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40 facts about elektrostal.

Written by Lanette Mayes

Modified & Updated: 02 Mar 2024

Reviewed by Jessica Corbett

Elektrostal is a vibrant city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia. With a rich history, stunning architecture, and a thriving community, Elektrostal is a city that has much to offer. Whether you are a history buff, nature enthusiast, or simply curious about different cultures, Elektrostal is sure to captivate you.

This article will provide you with 40 fascinating facts about Elektrostal, giving you a better understanding of why this city is worth exploring. From its origins as an industrial hub to its modern-day charm, we will delve into the various aspects that make Elektrostal a unique and must-visit destination.

So, join us as we uncover the hidden treasures of Elektrostal and discover what makes this city a true gem in the heart of Russia.

Key Takeaways:

• Elektrostal, known as the “Motor City of Russia,” is a vibrant and growing city with a rich industrial history, offering diverse cultural experiences and a strong commitment to environmental sustainability.
• With its convenient location near Moscow, Elektrostal provides a picturesque landscape, vibrant nightlife, and a range of recreational activities, making it an ideal destination for residents and visitors alike.

Known as the “Motor City of Russia.”

Elektrostal, a city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, earned the nickname “Motor City” due to its significant involvement in the automotive industry.

Home to the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Elektrostal is renowned for its metallurgical plant, which has been producing high-quality steel and alloys since its establishment in 1916.

Boasts a rich industrial heritage.

Elektrostal has a long history of industrial development, contributing to the growth and progress of the region.

Founded in 1916.

The city of Elektrostal was founded in 1916 as a result of the construction of the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Located approximately 50 kilometers east of Moscow.

Elektrostal is situated in close proximity to the Russian capital, making it easily accessible for both residents and visitors.

Known for its vibrant cultural scene.

Elektrostal is home to several cultural institutions, including museums, theaters, and art galleries that showcase the city’s rich artistic heritage.

A popular destination for nature lovers.

Surrounded by picturesque landscapes and forests, Elektrostal offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, and birdwatching.

Hosts the annual Elektrostal City Day celebrations.

Every year, Elektrostal organizes festive events and activities to celebrate its founding, bringing together residents and visitors in a spirit of unity and joy.

Has a population of approximately 160,000 people.

Elektrostal is home to a diverse and vibrant community of around 160,000 residents, contributing to its dynamic atmosphere.

Boasts excellent education facilities.

The city is known for its well-established educational institutions, providing quality education to students of all ages.

A center for scientific research and innovation.

Elektrostal serves as an important hub for scientific research, particularly in the fields of metallurgy, materials science, and engineering.

Surrounded by picturesque lakes.

The city is blessed with numerous beautiful lakes, offering scenic views and recreational opportunities for locals and visitors alike.

Well-connected transportation system.

Elektrostal benefits from an efficient transportation network, including highways, railways, and public transportation options, ensuring convenient travel within and beyond the city.

Famous for its traditional Russian cuisine.

Food enthusiasts can indulge in authentic Russian dishes at numerous restaurants and cafes scattered throughout Elektrostal.

Home to notable architectural landmarks.

Elektrostal boasts impressive architecture, including the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord and the Elektrostal Palace of Culture.

Offers a wide range of recreational facilities.

Residents and visitors can enjoy various recreational activities, such as sports complexes, swimming pools, and fitness centers, enhancing the overall quality of life.

Provides a high standard of healthcare.

Elektrostal is equipped with modern medical facilities, ensuring residents have access to quality healthcare services.

Home to the Elektrostal History Museum.

The Elektrostal History Museum showcases the city’s fascinating past through exhibitions and displays.

A hub for sports enthusiasts.

Elektrostal is passionate about sports, with numerous stadiums, arenas, and sports clubs offering opportunities for athletes and spectators.

Celebrates diverse cultural festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal hosts a variety of cultural festivals, celebrating different ethnicities, traditions, and art forms.

Electric power played a significant role in its early development.

Elektrostal owes its name and initial growth to the establishment of electric power stations and the utilization of electricity in the industrial sector.

Boasts a thriving economy.

The city’s strong industrial base, coupled with its strategic location near Moscow, has contributed to Elektrostal’s prosperous economic status.

Houses the Elektrostal Drama Theater.

The Elektrostal Drama Theater is a cultural centerpiece, attracting theater enthusiasts from far and wide.

Popular destination for winter sports.

Elektrostal’s proximity to ski resorts and winter sport facilities makes it a favorite destination for skiing, snowboarding, and other winter activities.

Promotes environmental sustainability.

Elektrostal prioritizes environmental protection and sustainability, implementing initiatives to reduce pollution and preserve natural resources.

Home to renowned educational institutions.

Elektrostal is known for its prestigious schools and universities, offering a wide range of academic programs to students.

Committed to cultural preservation.

The city values its cultural heritage and takes active steps to preserve and promote traditional customs, crafts, and arts.

Hosts an annual International Film Festival.

The Elektrostal International Film Festival attracts filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts from around the world, showcasing a diverse range of films.

Encourages entrepreneurship and innovation.

Elektrostal supports aspiring entrepreneurs and fosters a culture of innovation, providing opportunities for startups and business development.

Offers a range of housing options.

Elektrostal provides diverse housing options, including apartments, houses, and residential complexes, catering to different lifestyles and budgets.

Home to notable sports teams.

Elektrostal is proud of its sports legacy, with several successful sports teams competing at regional and national levels.

Boasts a vibrant nightlife scene.

Residents and visitors can enjoy a lively nightlife in Elektrostal, with numerous bars, clubs, and entertainment venues.

Promotes cultural exchange and international relations.

Elektrostal actively engages in international partnerships, cultural exchanges, and diplomatic collaborations to foster global connections.

Surrounded by beautiful nature reserves.

Nearby nature reserves, such as the Barybino Forest and Luchinskoye Lake, offer opportunities for nature enthusiasts to explore and appreciate the region’s biodiversity.

Commemorates historical events.

The city pays tribute to significant historical events through memorials, monuments, and exhibitions, ensuring the preservation of collective memory.

Promotes sports and youth development.

Elektrostal invests in sports infrastructure and programs to encourage youth participation, health, and physical fitness.

Hosts annual cultural and artistic festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal celebrates its cultural diversity through festivals dedicated to music, dance, art, and theater.

Provides a picturesque landscape for photography enthusiasts.

The city’s scenic beauty, architectural landmarks, and natural surroundings make it a paradise for photographers.

Connects to Moscow via a direct train line.

The convenient train connection between Elektrostal and Moscow makes commuting between the two cities effortless.

A city with a bright future.

Elektrostal continues to grow and develop, aiming to become a model city in terms of infrastructure, sustainability, and quality of life for its residents.

In conclusion, Elektrostal is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant present. From its origins as a center of steel production to its modern-day status as a hub for education and industry, Elektrostal has plenty to offer both residents and visitors. With its beautiful parks, cultural attractions, and proximity to Moscow, there is no shortage of things to see and do in this dynamic city. Whether you’re interested in exploring its historical landmarks, enjoying outdoor activities, or immersing yourself in the local culture, Elektrostal has something for everyone. So, next time you find yourself in the Moscow region, don’t miss the opportunity to discover the hidden gems of Elektrostal.

Q: What is the population of Elektrostal?

A: As of the latest data, the population of Elektrostal is approximately XXXX.

Q: How far is Elektrostal from Moscow?

A: Elektrostal is located approximately XX kilometers away from Moscow.

Q: Are there any famous landmarks in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to several notable landmarks, including XXXX and XXXX.

Q: What industries are prominent in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal is known for its steel production industry and is also a center for engineering and manufacturing.

Q: Are there any universities or educational institutions in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to XXXX University and several other educational institutions.

Q: What are some popular outdoor activities in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal offers several outdoor activities, such as hiking, cycling, and picnicking in its beautiful parks.

Q: Is Elektrostal well-connected in terms of transportation?

A: Yes, Elektrostal has good transportation links, including trains and buses, making it easily accessible from nearby cities.

Q: Are there any annual events or festivals in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal hosts various events and festivals throughout the year, including XXXX and XXXX.

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Traffic control is scheduled in some city sections from 5:30 AM to 11 AM on Sun, Apr. 28. More +

Traffic control is scheduled in some city sections from 5:30 AM to 11 AM on Sun, Apr. 28.

On Sun, Apr. 28, due to '2024 Seoul Half Marathon,' a traffic control is scheduled from 5:30 AM to 11 AM in some city sections: Gwanghwamun Square - Mapodaegyo Bridge - Peace Square, Sangam World Cup Park. Please use public transportation instead.

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May 2024 Cultural Events

Monthly event calendar.

Public Holidays and Anniversaries

• Workers’ Day (May 1)
• Children’s Day (May 5)
• Parents’ Day (May 8)
• Teacher’s Day (May 15)
• Buddha’s Birthday (May 15, [lunar] April 8)

Worker’s Day is a designated holiday aimed at recognizing and appreciating the hard work of workers and boosting their enthusiasm for work.

Established as a national holiday, Workers’ Day promotes the importance of labor in industrial society, uplifts the spirit of workers, enhances work morale, fosters harmonious labor-management relations, and cultivates environmental conservation awareness among the people.

Children’s Day is a designated holiday aimed at fostering children to grow up upright, wise, and courageous.

Established as a national holiday, Children’s Day cultivates an affectionate attitude towards children and promotes their healthy development by fostering a nationwide atmosphere of care and support.

Parents’ Day is a designated holiday aimed at recognizing gratitude towards ancestors and parents, and emphasizing the protection of adults and the elderly.

Established as a national holiday, Parents’ Day honors traditional virtues of gratitude towards parents and respect for adults and the elderly.

Celebrated annually on May 8th, on this day, family members express their gratitude by gifting carnations to their parents and spending time together as a family.

Teachers’ Day is a designated holiday aimed at fostering a societal atmosphere of respect for educational authority and honoring teachers.

Established as a national holiday, Teachers’ Day seeks to elevate the morale of educators and enhance their social status by promoting a culture of respect for educational authority. It is commemorated on May 15th, the birthday of King Sejong.

Across the country, students express their gratitude to their teachers by gifting carnations, symbolizing their appreciation for the guidance and support they receive.

Buddha’s Birthday is a significant Buddhist holiday that commemorates the birth of Siddhartha Gautama.

As one of the most important Buddhist festivals, Buddha’s Birthday has been celebrated in Korea as a traditional folk holiday for centuries and continues to be observed to this day, regardless of religious affiliation.

On this day, various events are held at major temples, including the Buddhist Lantern Festival and Gwandeungnori.

※ Lunar calendar: A traditional Korean calendar still in use today for determining dates of holidays such as Lunar New Year’s Day and Chuseok (lunisolar calendar)

Major Events in Seoul City

• Hangang River Light Show in the first half of 2024
• Hangang Park for Reading Books
• Car-Free Jamsugyo Bridge Festival (May 5, 12, 19, 26)
• Hangang Space-Out Competition (May 12)

“The Hangang River Light Show is a multimedia drone show featuring various drones, including LED drones, firework drones, and water drones, in the backdrop of the Hangang River.

The light show unfolds with diverse themes and concepts, with content changing depending on the season or event schedule. Typically, the show includes unique stage performances along the Hangang River, illuminated bridges, and buildings, as well as fireworks.

The Hangang River Light Show can be a special experience for visitors, who can enjoy Seoul’s beautiful night view alongside this captivating event. It’s a great opportunity for visitors to appreciate the beauty of the Hangang River and immerse themselves in the unique culture of Seoul.”

Hangang Park for Reading Books is a special space where visitors can enjoy both the beauty of the Hangang River’s nature and the pleasure of reading.

Car-Free Jamsugyo Bridge Festival is an annual event held at Banpo Hangang River Park and the Jamsugyo Bridge in Seoul.

During this festival, vehicular traffic is suspended, allowing visitors to walk or cycle across the bridge while enjoying the beautiful scenery of the Hangang River. Additionally, various events such as Small Library, flea markets, street performances, food trucks, and photo zones are organized, providing visitors with a unique and memorable experience.”

The Hangang Space-Out Competition is a unique event that questions whether doing nothing is a waste of time in our busy modern society. It offers a fresh perspective on the leisure and relaxation culture of modern people and serves as a group performance where participants can experience stress relief and mental stability.

During the competition, silence is required from participants. They can signal their needs using colored cards: ▴Red Card (for a massage when feeling sleepy) ▴Blue Card (for water when thirsty) ▴Yellow Card (for a fan when hot) ▴Black Card (for other needs). Upon showing these cards, the event staff will assist accordingly.

The championship winner is determined by a combination of ‘Heart Rate Graph’ and ‘On-Site Citizen Voting.’ Participants use wristband heart rate monitors to track their heart rates. Those maintaining a stable or decreasing heart rate are recognized as an ‘excellent participant.’

Cultural Event

2024 seoul outdoor library at hangang park.

• Dates : Sat, May 4, 2024 – Sat, Jun. 22, 2024 Every Sat, 2:00 PM-9:00 PM
• Venue : Nokeumsu Plaza at Yeouido Hangang Park & Picnic Park at Gangseo Hangang Park
• Admission : Free
• Content : Seoul Outdoor Library at Hangang Park is Seoul’s signature refreshing spot where visitors can enjoy books and cultural performances simultaneously. There are also children’s play areas, flea markets featuring reading materials, and various experiential program zones.
• Contact : +82-70-4492-0088
• Website : https://hangangoutdoorlib.seoul.kr/

2024 Gwanghwamun Family Fun Festival ‘Pop Up! Fun Up!’

• Dates : Sat, May 4, 2024 – Mon, May 6, 2024 11:00 AM-5:00 PM
• Venue : Yukjo Square at Gwanghwamun Square
• Content : Gwanghwamun Family Fun Festival offers plenty of attractions not only for kids but also for parents, including the Cinema Concert, magic shows, and various entertaining performances. Media pop-up booths like GenieTV also provide interactive and engaging programs to ensure constant excitement.
• Contact : +82-2-120
• Website : https://gwanghwamun.seoul.go.kr/

2024 Seoul Drum Festival

• Dates : Sat, May 25, 2024 – Sun, May 26, 2024 2:00 PM-9:00 PM
• Venue : Nodeul Island
• Content : The 26th Seoul Drum Festival, themed ‘DRUM MY SOUL,’ focuses on percussion instruments and showcases performances by both domestic and international artists. The festival also offers a range of events and citizen programs such as drum experiences.
• Contact : +82-2-537-7109
• Website : www.seouldrumfestival.com

[Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra] Jaap van Zweden and Yeol Eum Son ①

• Dates : Thu, May 9, 2024 8:00 PM-9:40 PM
• Venue : Lotte Concert Hall
• Admission : ₩120,000(R), ₩90,000(S), ₩60,000(A), ₩30,000(B), ₩10,000(C)
• Content : Pianist Yeol Eum Son, who steers K-classic, and music director Japp van Zweden lead regular performances.
• Contact : +82-1588-1210
• Website : https://www.seoulphil.or.kr/

[Seoul Namsan Gukakdang] 2024 Young Korean Traditional Music Concert ‘DAY OFF’

• Dates : Wed, May 1, 2024 – Fri, May 3, 2024 12:30 PM / 7:00 PM
• Venue : Seoul Namsan Gukakdang Inner Court
• Content : A daytime and nighttime concert that breathes life and relaxation into weary daily routines through diverse performances by young artists, all set in a hanok in the heart of the city.
• Contact : +82-2-6358-5500
• Website : https://www.hanokmaeul.or.kr/

[Seoul Museum of Craft Art] A Korean-Austrian Contemporary Jewellery Showcase <Beyond Adornment>

• Dates : Tue, May 28, 2024 – Sun, Jul. 28, 2024 Tue-Sun 10:00 AM-6:00 PM *Closed on Mondays, Open until 9:00 PM on Fridays
• Venue : 3F, Exhibition Building 1, Seoul Museum of Craft Art
• Content : The exhibition highlights the contemporary jewellery history and outstanding works of both countries through the creations of 111 jewellery artists from Korea and Austria.
• Contact : +82-2-6450-7000
• Website : https://craftmuseum.seoul.go.kr/

[Future Hangang Project Headquarters] 2024 Hangang River Festival-Spring

• Dates : Fri, May 17, 2024 – Sun, May 19, 2024 Varies by program
• Venue : Five Hangang Parks (Ttukseom, Yeouido, Mangwon, Gangseo, Banpo)
• Admission : Free (Some programs may require a fee.)
• Content : The Hangang River Festival offers a variety of puppet theater performances, and playing experiences like parades, and board games. Set amidst the spring blossoms of Seoraeseom Island, it’s a cultural festival perfect for enjoying spring outings along the Hangang River.
• Website : https://festival.seoul.go.kr/hangang

[Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture] 2024 Seoul Circus Festival

• Dates : Sat, May 4, 2024 – Sun, May 5, 2024 Sat, Sun 12:00 PM-8:30 PM
• Content : A magical festival that appears for just two days on Children’s Day! Set against the backdrop of a ‘circus,’ experience astonishing and fantastical moments with your children, family, loved ones, and friends.
• Contact : +82-2-758-2036
• Website : https://www.sfac.or.kr/

[Seoul Design Foundation] DDP Spring Festival: Design Zoo

• Dates : Fri, May 3, 2024 – Mon, May 6, 2024 10:00 AM-8:00 PM *Varies by program
• Venue : Inside and outside of DDP
• Content : DDP Spring Festival features an urban zoo concept, where visitors can enjoy large animal sculptures, experiential programs, and performances.
• Contact : +82-2-2153-0071
• Website : https://ddp.or.kr/

[Donuimun Museum Village] Jeong-dong Culture Night The Artist’s Time <When the Cheongsachorong Lanterns Light Up>

• Dates : Sat, May 25, 2024 Sat, May 25 6:00 PM-9:00 PM
• Venue : Donuimun Museum Village Hanok-dong
• Admission : ₩30,000
• Content : Under the moonlight and cool breeze, enjoy a special one-day class in a hanok illuminated by Cheongsachorong lanterns, and immerse yourself in the ambiance of the sleepless nights of May.
• Contact : +82-2-736-6993 (Program Support Office)
• Website : https://dmvillage.info/Hanok
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Related Contents

previous April 2024 Cultural Events

April 2024 cultural events.

Ban on public nudity among proposed Brevard tourism cultural grant modifications

Brevard County Commission Chair Jason Steele is recommending that a new restriction be put in place on county tourism grants to arts and cultural organizations ― no nudity at public events, or else you'll be disqualified from getting a grant.

Steele put forth his proposal at a recent meeting of the Brevard County Tourist Development Council , the tourism advisory board that Steele also chairs. Steele wants the proposal incorporated into the county guidelines for cultural grants — guidelines that must go to the County Commission for final approval.

"I'm only concerned about nudity and partial nudity and things of that nature that might be offensive to children and their families," Steele said.

During the TDC discussion of the issue, Steele didn't define "partial nudity" or cite any specific examples of this happening at events that received county cultural grants.

In a subsequent interview, Steele said he is not aware of any particular past instances, and is not targeting any specific events or organizations. But he wants to make sure that grant recipients abide by state and local laws, and wants to avoid situations "that potentially could harm children."

Cultural grants and other tourism grants are funded by Brevard County's 5% tourist development tax on hotel and motel rooms, vacation rentals and other short-term rentals.

Tourism cultural grants have been awarded by the county for years, but became controversial since August, when Florida Rep. Randy Fine, who represents South Brevard County, raised questions about a proposed $15,000 grant to the LGBTQ+ organization Space Coast Pride for its 2024 Pridefest event in downtown Melbourne.

Part of Fine's concerns stemmed from the Drag Queen Story Time that was a part of some previous Pridefest events. Drag Queen Story Time was not included in the 2023 Pridefest, held in Sept. 23.

Space Coast Pride eventually received approval for its grant for its Sept. 28, 2024, event. But not before the County Commission briefly withdrew funding for cultural grants altogether, affecting 25 arts and cultural organizations and events, as money was shifted to paying for ocean lifeguards and marketing expenses for the lifeguard program.

"There was a big issue before," Steele said, referring to the cultural grant program, while adding: "I'm not pointing my finger at anybody."

Steele said his proposed restriction is limited to events that are held in a public venue that can be viewed by passersby. He said it's not intended to censor performances by local theater groups or other entities that may qualify for grants ― events in which patrons purchase a ticket for the event, and parents can decide on their own whether to bring their children to the performance.

The Brevard County attorney's office has been working to come up with specific language for the County Commission to consider, reflecting Steele's wishes.

Space Coast Office of Tourism Executive Director Peter Cranis said the language in the grant guidelines "can't be too subjective."

The discussion of Steele's proposal came as the Tourist Development Council made a series of recommendation for the cultural grant program — as well as for two other grant programs funded by the tourist development tax ― for the 2024-25 budget year that begins Oct. 1.

Cultural funding reversal: 25 cultural entitles again in line for Brevard grants, reigniting Pridefest controversy

Cultural and sports grants

The TDC recommended that $605,000 be allocated for cultural grants, and that the grants be tied to the number of out-of-town visitors the events are expected to attract.

It also recommended $240,000 in grants for sporting events, with amounts tied to the number of hotel room-nights each events generates.

Cranis, however, pointed out that cultural grant funding would be contingent on what the County Commission decides to do related to funding of beach lifeguards. Money for the county's lifeguard program potentially could be shifted from the pool of tourist tax money designated for cultural programs.

"There may not be any money for cultural grants, period," Steele said.

Nevertheless, TDC member Julie Braga, a hotel general manager, maintained that the TDC needs to send the message to the County Commission that cultural grants are important, and that arts and cultural events help bring tourists to the Space Coast, thus generating tourist tax revenue.

Tourism + Lagoon Grant Programs

The TDC recommended that Tourism + Lagoon Grant Program — which is designed for tourism-related projects that benefit the Indian River Lagoon — be given $500,000 for grants in 2024-25.

The program previously was funded for up to $1 million for several years. This grant program was suspended for the 2023-24 budget year, as a result of the expenditure of all tourist-tax-generated beach funds in order to repair the South Beaches because of damages from several storms in late 2022.

Under the TDC's proposal for the 2024-25 budget year, grants in this program could be for up to $50,000 apiece.

The Tourism + Lagoon Grant Program guidelines will come before the County Commission for final approval on Tuesday. The cultural and sports programs guidelines will be on a future County Commission agenda, potentially in July.

Dave Berman is business editor at  FLORIDA TODAY.  Contact Berman at  [email protected] , on X at  @bydaveberman  and on Facebook at  www.facebook.com/dave.berman.54

Visual culture and the Moscow Metro

James Andrews first rode the Moscow Metro in the 1980s as an undergraduate student studying in the former Soviet Union.

Now after 35 years, the metro is taking him on a new journey: documenting how its iconic public spaces reveal the story of Moscow itself as the city evolved under Joseph Stalin and his Soviet and post-Soviet successors.

This May, Andrews, professor of history, gave a public lecture on his new research project at the Kennan Institute in Washington, D.C. The Kennan Institute is part of the Woodrow Wilson Center, where Andrews was a former senior resident fellow.

The talk, which has been made available on YouTube, was so well-received that Andrews immediately received an additional invitation to present at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University.

What makes the Moscow Metro a fascinating subject for a historian? More people ride the Moscow Metro each day than the New York City Subway and London Tube combined, yet its history is relatively unknown, Andrews said.

“Everyone has a story about the metro, but there has never been a book in English about its history,” Andrews said. “Many of my generation spent an endless amount of time on the metro. Before people had cell phones, you would always say, ‘Well, we’ll meet on the platform at this station.’ Everyone spent time traveling through this cavernous system. It’s a labyrinth really, but at the same time people don’t know much about its history in detail.”

Andrews’ previous books focus on the history of Russian science, technology and the Soviet space program. His new book project on the metro is another opportunity to study iconic Soviet technology, as well as visual culture.

The original metro stations, built with deep shaft tunneling methods beginning in 1932, had airy open ceilings with gorgeous bas-relief architecture—a canvas that Stalin used to create a public art monument to socialism.

“Socialist countries had a tendency to produce technologies that they could adorn with stories,” Andrews said. “Their metro was started in the 1930s under Stalin, and they invested a lot of money in it. It was important for two reasons: there was a utilitarian nature. The crowds were incredible in Moscow. They needed better public transportation. People had been flooding in from the countryside during collectivization. The other thing was to come up with a monument to socialism. That’s why they hired all these architects to decorate, and they decorated each station thematically.”

In the years after Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev issued an edict rejecting the metro’s flamboyant architectural style in favor of a pre-fabricated, practical style, Andrews said. At the same time all over the city, de-Stalinization was happening, and street signs, busts of Stalin and station names were changed or removed.

“The irony is Stalin funded it,” Andrews said. “It’s a Stalin-era display technology project, but by the Khrushchev era they were erasing Stalin’s name from it.”

Andrews has had unlimited access to Moscow’s architectural archives, including many original photographic negatives, and will return to Russia next summer to research political archives.

“The Bolsheviks liked to document everything, but I was shocked at how many photographs they had taken of all these projects, documenting every stage and how well they were preserved,” he said.

Throughout his research, he has uncovered more stories hidden within familiar metro spaces.

One Russian architectural archivist told Andrews about being born in the metro in 1942, during a time when its underground stations housed makeshift hospitals, military meetings and even cultural events such as film nights.

Public spaces bear new stories over time, and Andrews is closely following the story told by newly constructed metro stations. New stations are bringing back marble-laden aesthetics and cultural themes that highlight famous Russian figures like chemist Dmitri Mendeleev or writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, he said.

“I think the story tells us now that during Putin’s era you see a resurgence of Russian nationalism and Russian themes,” he said. “Not every station can be imploded into this reductive narrative, but it points again to how the narrative of the metro stations changes as the politics of Russian change to some extent and the city itself.”

And it shows how the Moscow Metro has a seemingly endless amount of track for a historian to travel.

“What I love about the project is there is a political history to it, a technological history, a social history, an engineering element, and an artistic element,” Andrews said. “It’s a multi-disciplinary study, which is both fascinating to me and challenging.”

Published: June 17, 2016