Jeremy Wells - Böcker

"Take up the white man's burden!" So wrote the English writer Rudyard Kipling in 1899, in a poem aimed at Americans at a time when colonial ambitions were particularly high. The poem proved especially popular among white southern men, who saw in its vision of America's imperial future an image that appeared to reflect and even redeem the South's plantation past.Romances of the White Man's Burden takes on works in American literature in which the proverbial "old plantation" is made to seem not a relic but a harbinger, a sign that the South had arrived at a multiracial modernity and harmony before the rest of the United States. Focusing on writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Henry W. Grady, Thomas Dixon, and William Faulkner, Jeremy Wells reveals their shared fixation on the figure of the white southern man as specially burdened by history. Each of these writers, in his own way, presented the plantation South as an emblem, not an aberration, of America.

From 1849 to the early 1980s, the development of US historic preservation policy was shaped by fewer than one hundred elite White men from Europe and America. This orthodox preservation doctrine has too long silenced the vibrant, experiential relationships between everyday people and their heritage. Managing the Magic of Old Places: Crafting Public Policies for Human-Centered Historic Preservation offers a radical rethinking of how historic preservation is approached in the United States. Author Jeremy C. Wells argues for a revolutionary shift in federal preservation policy—one that embraces community-based participatory practice and draws from environmental psychology to tap into the intangible, emotional connections people have with old places. Wells highlights the experiential values that laypeople often ascribe to historic environments, which are frequently dismissed by expert-driven policies. He contends that if historic preservation policy continues to ignore these aspects, the field will lose relevance as the gap between professionals and the public widens. Drawing from interdisciplinary research in the social sciences, particularly phenomenology and environmental psychology, Wells’s vision of public preservation policy centers the lived experiences of communities, reinvigorating the field and ensuring that the preservation of historic places resonates with a wider, more inclusive audience. Wells positions his work within the growing field of critical heritage studies, yet his focus on the psychological and emotional aspects of preservation distinguishes it as a unique contribution. By placing the needs and experiences of the public at the heart of preservation efforts, Wells critiques the historical foundations of US preservation policy while offering a bold agenda for reform.