The Politics of Historic Preservation: From Charleston to Cleveland

As home to the nation’s first Historic Zoning Ordinance, Charleston, South Carolina serves as a rich case study for understanding the motivations and challenges of the historic preservation movement. Led by elite white woman, Charleston’s preservation story enables us to explore the tensions among history and heritage, personal memory and personal politics, and inclusion and exclusion in the built environment. Yuhl will use Charleston as a case study to propose some probing questions about the legacies of preservation work that she hopes will spark discussion about Shaker Heights’ past and possible future legacies.

This virtual talk is free to the public and is made possible through support from Ohio Humanities.

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Stephanie Yuhl (PhD Duke University) is Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts and Associate Faculty in the Critical Conservation Master in Design Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She specializes in the social and cultural history of the twentieth-century United States, with emphases in public history, memory, gender/sexuality, and social movements. Her book-length treatment of Charleston’s cultural and touristic renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston, won two national awards. A practicing public historian and consultant, Yuhl has worked with museums, oral history projects, and in the Digital Humanities. She recently co-curated LGBTQ+ Worcester For the Record at the Worcester Historical Museum, and co-authored the accompanying catalog. At the center of this ongoing project is the building of an LGBTQ+ historical archive and a community oral history project.