| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

David Hamer. History in Urban Places: The Historic Districts of the United States. (Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series.) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1998. Pp. xiii, 277. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

The first book on a proliferating American approach to interpreting and using history should be required reading for anyone concerned with the "history" in historic districts. These districts are the most common and most effective prescription of preservationists for saving and interpreting the past. 1

Criticism, as David Hamer explains, centers on concerns that historic districts often celebrate only a particular, isolated interpretation of the past that suits contemporary needs. Discovering an area's actual history is often less important to district makers than creating a tool to stop urban decay, to bolster sagging morale or real estate values, or to create a historical theme park to attract commerce. 2

District designation processes often overlook long periods of decline and invasion of ethnic minorities. Instead they glory in a past golden age when the community's movers and shakers lived there. Districts also represent, Hamer adds, "a decline in optimism about the future, a turning away from the linear model of faith in perpetual progress to nostalgic invocation of the past" (p. 26). "My principal aim," Hamer writes, is "an assessment of which facets of American urban development are represented among historic districts and which are not" (p. ix). Historic districts, for instance, rarely reflect the transient populations and transient architecture and usage that typify American cities. Furthermore, "the history that is being remembered is not the history of the ancestors of the people who now live in them" (p. 97). . . .

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