Radical Openness in Preserving Regional Heritage (original) (raw)
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The studies of paradise penetrate the field of imaginary and symbolic universes; hence, postcards are one of the fundamental sources for understanding its dimension as a cultural construct. Postcards usually represent stereotyped landscapes that communicate the identity of a region. These images are like windows that show to loved ones of tourists, their lived experiences in foreign places or exotic geographies. The Florida Postcard Collection of the University of Miami offers an extensive archive of pictures that reflect the fabulous beaches, palms, art deco architecture, and Everglades tropical vegetation that Florida is known for. It should be noted that the concept of “tropical” does not only include the fantasy and exoticism associated with paradisiacal plantations of different contexts, but also connotes a sensibility that recognizes the impact of climate, and flora and fauna on the constitution of culture.
The Museum Review, 2019
Northwest Florida encompasses a variety of cultural resources, including many small museums and historical societies that are dedicated to local heritage tourism and preservation. However, these resources are not widely known and the area is mainly recognized for its white beaches along its coast. In 2016, the University of West Florida’s Florida Public Archaeology Network began an initiative to conduct an assessment of cultural heritage tourism in the region based on the United States’ National Trust for Historic Preservation’s principles for successful heritage tourism. With the cooperation of stakeholders such as local museums and the Panhandle Historic Preservation Alliance, the goal was to identify aspects that can be improved specifically in small museums for achieving a more collaborative and harmonized cultural heritage tourism strategy and museums management. Following the development of criteria for museum assessment and presenting the outcome of the assessment, the current research identifies potentials in the management of these museums and outlines an approach for improving cultural heritage tourism and historic preservation for these museums in the future.
Fragments of Memory and Legacies of Inequalities on the Changing Landscape of a Coastal Florida City
American Anthropology Association annual meeting, 2019
Three concurrent dynamics provide a lens to recognize the predicaments for African American heritage in the coastal Florida city of Sarasota: a recent heritage vitalization, gentrification, and climate change. In the 2010s, the City of Sarasota funded a heritage program to redeem decades of official erasure of Black history. The excitement from the oral histories facilitated a heritage vitalization as elders recall the struggles and successes of the 20 th century and a talented community scholar presented the memories to eager audiences, first at lectures and now at tours that highlight past and present. The heritage program grew as parts of neighborhoods were bulldozed and replaced through gentrification that felt threatening all the historic areas of Black life. As a heritage trail, new restaurants, and a cultural history museum are moving forward, climate change lurks over the coast, with rising sea levels and storm surge slowly being recognized as a threat, differentially impacting those African-American neighborhoods. Heritage as resilience incorporating the intangible offers opportunities; heritage as social action is a productive avenue for a community recognizing its past as its neighborhoods are being challenged by a future of sea level rise on the Florida coast.
Preservation's Cultural Turn: Recognizing Contemporary Significance of Historic Places
Even as preservation practice in the U.S. has expanded beyond monumental architecture to embrace vernacular buildings, cultural landscapes, and traditional cultural places, the criteria for evaluating significance codified in the 1960s following approval of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) remain unchanged. Rather than amending these criteria to reflect theoretical advances, preservationists have developed an elaborate set of “work-arounds” – administrative guidelines in a series of National Register bulletins that interpret the codified criteria with regard to various resource types. This incremental approach has allowed us to redefine integrity in relation to traditional cultural places (TCPs), and to identify exceptions to the so-called “50-year rule” by thoroughly documenting the context of resources from the recent past. However, we still lack the ability to recognize or protect historic places that derive their primary significance from contemporary cultural use, associations and meaning. In contrast, Australia has long incorporated both past-oriented and present-oriented criteria in their approaches to evaluating significance. Notably, the 1975 Australian Heritage Commission Act included social value among a list of criteria that otherwise closely resembles U.S. regulations, and the 1979 Burra Charter, drafted by Australia ICOMOS, provides guidance on assessing social value. This chapter argues that adding social value to the U.S. National Register criteria (36 CFR 60) would provide preservation with a way to better engage with, for example, first and second generation immigrant communities settled in historic urban neighborhoods, or with places associated with traditional economies where preserving continuity of activity is usually more important than either historical associations or aesthetic qualities. These kinds of opportunities for engagement through consideration of social value represent areas of critical need for preserving our collective heritage, given the demographic and economic transformation of our nation in the twenty-first century. Published as: Taylor, Holly A. "Preservation's Cultural Turn: Recognizing Contemporary Significance of Historic Places," in Creating Historic Preservation in the 21st Century, edited by Richard Wagner and De Teel Patterson Tiller. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018.
Heritage as Social Action: Sarasota/Manatee in an Age of Rising Sea Levels
New College Public Archaeology Lab Research Series #5, 2019
The Tidally United Summit, held in Sarasota in August 2018, focused on heritage and rising sea levels. This report, part of the New College Public Archaeology research series, offers the background for rising sea levels in southwest Florida and provides lessons from archaeology to increase community resilience in Florida for life in the Anthropocene. An appendix describes the planning, context, and details for the Summit.
Journal of Florida Studies, 2021
This tour of the freedom-seeking people focuses on the early 19th century Florida Gulf Coast; some of the locations are hidden in plain sight. The settlements were along major rivers entering the Gulf of Mexico, places where archaeological research has recovered and even reconstructed the landscapes of freedom. In one of those heritage sites, diasporic people have returned to celebrate on the ground their ancestors found liberty. The evidence for this early 19th-century history is fragmentary and in the process of being organized, analyzed, and disseminated. Traveling across the contemporary landscape, the places can be missed. But the result of noticing this robust heritage animates understandings of history beneath our feet as we travel down the Florida peninsula.