The Power of Place in Our Everyday Lives.

This week’s readers were gave us an interest look at how place effects different aspects of history. The book we read is titled The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History by Dolores Hayden and gives a new perspective on how to deal with history and preservation from not only a historian’s point of view but from the point of view of an architect as well as a sociologist. As history majors,  we get so caught up in the idea that we know how the world should interpret history but we do not really take into consideration what other fields have to say about the history. According to the story in the beginning of the book about an architect and a sociologist going head to head about why certain buildings should or shouldn't be saved, historians aren’t the only ones who only understand their point of view. Another interesting thing that the author talks about is the complete disregard of ethnic groups and women when it comes to the discussion of place. Hayden states that it is only in the last 10-20 years that places have started trying to preserve places that hold significance to the civil rights movement and women’s rights. (Here is a website created by the Park Service to document and display significant women's rights monuments and places.) 

I also thought it was interesting the idea of place memory. I guess I never really thought about it but places do evoke memory even if they were seemingly insignificant memories. Hayden says “Because the urban landscape stimulates visual memory, it is an important but underutilized resource for public history”. (pg. 47) she continues on to give an example: a curator in Baltimore complained that the every oral history interview she did, the person only talked about place. If we stop and actually think about what emotions and memories our childhood home, or school or some physical place evoke within us, it should make sense that places are all people ever talk about. Places like the Statue of Liberty have place memory for the whole nation but on a more personal level, what holds place memory for you? For me, it's my house, the places I have worked over the years; any place that holds any kind of memory for me. 

Picture from the World Historical Places Blog

The author then goes into a detailed kind of case-study about Los Angeles, CA and how they are having a difficult time understand and documenting their social history. She describes the diversity that characterizes LA and how that shapes the history that is told about Los Angeles. It is interesting to read about the troubles that surround documenting the history of LA and I wasn’t really sure why it was relevant, and then I read the back cover of the book. Hayden does a lot of her work on Los Angeles so I guess it kind of makes sense to add.