An Invitation to Civic Dialogue

Those of us who have benefited from the climate of injustice need an invitation from others to join with them in changing our social climate to a climate of justice. The controversaries over national monuments opens the door to explore the question of who needs an invitation from whom and what white people need to learn in order to respond to the civilian invitation from others. The others include future generations, Syrian refugees, migrants at our Southern border, and personal invitations from People of Color. Personal invitations depend on our aptitude in engaging in dialogue, as is illustrated by an imaginary dialogue involving a white man and a black woman. Such dialogues can create the conditions for good conversations, and these conversation can move us toward a climate of justice—an ethical foundation for developing policies to protect our habitat for future generations.

When Climate Ruled the Dinosaurs of Grand Staircase

Living in Geologic Time: Navigate the prolific boneyards and shifting boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments.

Restorations in Chile in the Mid-Twentieth Century: The National Monuments Council and Some of the First Architectural Heritage Interventions

This paper presents the initial results of an ongoing historical research project that addresses some of the first architectural restoration interventions led by the Chilean State through the National Monuments Council, the institution responsible for management of the country’s cultural heritage. The National Monuments Council was created in 1925 by Decree-Law No. 651, the first long-standing legal provision to cover this aspect of cultural heritage. It remained in place for several decades before being superseded in 1970 by the current National Monuments Law (No. 17,288). The State’s first steps in regard to architectural restoration were made possible by this legislation, and by the mid-twentieth century, the National Monuments Council was working systematically to register, analyse and take action to restore the country’s architectural heritage. In 1949, a Conservation Commission was formed as part of the Council, and this body played a key role in the promotion of restoration projects at the time. The National Monuments Council worked in partnership with the General Directorate of Public Works, and efforts on the part of the two public institutions resulted in the creation of an annual budget for architectural restoration. By the 1950s, numerous buildings and sites considered relevant to the national identity were being restored, and efforts were made to emphasise their cultural significance and value. These early interventions were some of the first of their type to be funded by the State and were fundamental to the local architectural historical context. Work focused primarily on religious and military colonial buildings, including churches, chapels and fortresses located the length of Chile. Archival material from the time, such as National Monuments Council session minutes and institutional bulletins drafted under Decree-Law No. 651, provide a record of these early interventions. Analysis of these sources from a technical and theoretical perspective provides insights into the motivations and selection criteria used to establish an order of priority for the restoration of buildings and sites. This paper presents the main actions taken at a time when architectural restoration was first being promoted by the Chilean State and explores how these provided the foundations upon which future development of the local discipline would occur.

The Sandhill Crane State: A Naturalist’s Guide to Nebraska

This book includes the locations, descriptions, and points of biological, historical, geological, or paleontological interest of nearly 350 sites in Nebraska, most of which are free to access. Its 53,000 words include accounts of 9 state historical parks, 8 state parks, 2 national forests, 2 national monuments, and 7 national wildlife refuges as well as 181 wildlife management areas, 56 waterfowl production areas, and 54 state recreation areas. It also includes 48 state and county maps, 18 drawings, 33 photographs, and nearly 200 literature citations.

Utilizing Urban Geospatial Data to Understand Heritage Attractiveness in Amsterdam

Touristic cities are home to historical landmarks and irreplaceable urban heritages. Although tourism brings financial advantages, mass tourism creates pressure on historical cities. Therefore, “attractiveness” is one of the key elements to explain tourism dynamics. User-contributed and geospatial data provide an evidence-based understanding of people’s responses to these places. In this article, the combination of multisource information about national monuments, supporting products (i.e., attractions, museums), and geospatial data are utilized to understand attractive heritage locations and the factors that make them attractive. We retrieved geotagged photographs from the Flickr API, then employed density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm to find clusters. Then combined the clusters with Amsterdam heritage data and processed the combined data with ordinary least square (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) to identify heritage attractiveness and relevance of supporting products in Amsterdam. The results show that understanding the attractiveness of heritages according to their types and supporting products in the surrounding built environment provides insights to increase unattractive heritages’ attractiveness. That may help diminish the burden of tourism in overly visited locations. The combination of less attractive heritage with strong influential supporting products could pave the way for more sustainable tourism in Amsterdam.

CONFRONTATION IN THE CIRCLES OF UKRAINIAN INTERWAR EMIGRATION: TWO VISIONS OF PRESERVATION OF THE NATIONAL MONUMENTS

The aim of the article is to analyze the specifics of archival and museum activities of Ukrainian emigrants of the 20s - 30s of the XX century and finding out the essenсe and reasons for their differences of opinion on the preservation of Ukrainian archival heritage. The phenomenon of Ukrainian interwar emigration was a unique phenomenon in Ukrainian history and culture given the importance of its functioning in all spheres - state, political, cultural. Characterizing the conditions and specifics of the second wave of Ukrainian emigration, it should be noted that it was complicated by material shortages and lack of consolidated unity, which led to the confrontation of certain groups in solving various problems of everyday emigration. Based on the analysis of published and out-of-date archival materials, the article concludes that there was no common vision in the circles of Ukrainian interwar emigration on the protection of national monuments, which caused confrontation between its separate groups. The causes of the conflict largely lay in the party affiliation of the conflicting parties (the Petliurists, represented by the State Center of the Ukrainian People's Republic in exile and the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries), through whose prism the preservation of Ukrainian monuments was considered. Party interests were placed above national ones, resulting in a lack of understanding and a loss of unity of Ukrainian patriotic forces.

Seminarium Kondakovianum as a European Centre for the Crimean Studies (1920s)

An art historian and an expert in architectural objects restoration N. P. Kondakov emigrated to Czechoslovakia where a circle of emigrant historians shaped around him. This scholarly society developing from the Byzantologist N. P. Kondakov’s home circle in Prague was titled in Byzantine way, Seminarium Kondakovianum. After his death in February 1925, this small-in-number academic community with support from the Czechoslovak government developed into a foreign school of Byzantologists and Russian historians. Thus, there appeared a Russian institution with international statute in Prague. The study of intertwined western and eastern influences in Russian history became a typical motif of Russian scholarly thought in emigration. In this connection, the Crimea became an interesting object for the researches and historical generalizations by the Seminaium members. The paper introduces into the scholarship the materials from the archive of the Seminarium Kondakovianum (Kondakov Institute) now residing in the Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The analysis attracts the documents from N. P. Kondakov’s personal collection at the Literary Archives of Written National Monuments of the Slavonic Library in Prague. There are interesting unpublished manuscripts by the Seminarium members discovered by the author. There were three circles of Crimean researchers determined at the Seminarium’s works: historians living in Prague who studied the mediaeval history of the Crimea and the history of research (N. M. Beliaev, G. V. Vernadsky, A. P. Kalitinskii, D. А. Rasovskii, N. P. Toll’); a group of historians from the USSR attracted by G. V. Vernadsky to send their papers for discussion (D. V. Ainalov, S. А. Zhebelev, N. V. Izmailova, A. I. Markevich, and others); Russian emigrant historians living in other countries (M. I. Rostovtsev, alter on G. V. Vernadsky). G. V. Vernadsky was the chief organizer and the academic curator of the Seminarium. G. V. Vernadsky’s skillful practice on attraction to the Seminarium of leading Soviet experts in the Crimean studies allowed the annual to publish their works thus enlarging the sphere of the historians’ scholarly communications. The contacts (correspondence) with the Taurida Society for History, Archaeology, and Ethnography (Simferopol) and the State Museum of Chersonese (Sevastopol) were established. Hysteria made by the Soviet secret service and Communist party leaders around the “case of S. A. Zhebelev,” directly connected with the cooperation of Soviet and emigrant historians, resulted in the cease of the said contacts and book exchange. In 1931, the Seminarium was reshaped into N. P. Kondakov Institute with the change of the participants and the disappearance of the Crimea aspect from the agenda for sessions.

Adaptive Reuse of Religious Heritage and Its Impact on House Prices

Due to social demographic change and secularization, religious heritage sites in Europe are on the verge of losing their original functions. While the adaptive reuse seems to be a proactive strategy to preserve the historical and cultural value embedded in religious heritage sites, little is known concerning its external impact. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the external effect of reusing religious heritage on surrounding house prices. Employing both the parametric and non-parametric difference-in-differences hedonic model on a sample of 42 projects of reusing religious heritage and a rich dataset of housing transactions in the Netherlands, we find significant positive externality of reusing religious heritage on local house prices. The external effects are heterogeneous across differentiated project size and monumental status. Larger religious heritage reuse projects and those listed as national monuments exert greater influence on surrounding house prices.