History Practicum is a graduate seminar in historic interpretation, with a focus this semester on interpreting the built environment. The following books have been ordered through the University District Bookstore except for Stillgoe’s Common Landscape of America. That book is out of print, so please seek used copies (which are plentiful). Most other books on the list are also widely available as used books at low cost.

Read for the first class:

Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage – make sure to get the fourth edition, expanded and updated with a new introduction by R. Bruce Craig (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

Additional books (roughly in the order that we will read them; one or two more may be added):

Rose, Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).

Added 12/19: Cresswell, Place: An Introduction (Wiley, second edition 2014) – publisher out of stock, paperbacks available online and e-book available.

Stillgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 (Yale University Press, 1983) – out of print, seek used copies.

Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (Yale University Press, 2008).

Orvell, The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Meeks, The Past and Future City: How Historic Preservation is Reviving America’s Communities (Island Press, 2016).

Harris, New Solutions for House Museums (Rowman and Littlefield/Altamira Press, 2007).

Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (University of Illinois Press, second edition, 1993).

 

Suggested for reference (will be available in the MARCH office):

McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses (Knopf, 2013 edition)

Boehm and Corey, America’s Urban History (Routledge, 2015)

Foner and McGirr, American History Now (historiographical essays by time period and theme, Temple University Press, 2011 edition)