Sight Lines and Curb Appeal: Landscape, Race, and Compromise at Three North Carolina State Historic Sites

abstract:Historic preservation and race are inextricably linked in the US. The questions of what to preserve as historic sites, how to interpret these histories, and how to unearth marginalized, often racialized histories at existing historic sites have been taken up by numerous scholars. However, despite this vital attention to the buildings and indoor educational spaces of public historic sites, there has been a dearth of investigation in public history scholarship into the outdoor spaces: the supposedly neutral landscapes that surround preserved or reconstructed buildings. In this article, I draw on cultural geography and geographies of memory to argue that historic site landscapes, far from being neutral backdrops, are vital to examine for the ways in which they construct a version of history in place. Through semi-structured interviews, textual analysis, and participant observation at three state historic sites in central North Carolina, I examine historic site landscapes as spaces of compromise and denaturalize a visual genre of historic site landscapes that is not racially neutral.