How might the history of the built environment come alive to undergraduate students, and perhaps the broader public? And how might that history be relevant, accessible, and legible relative to contemporary familiar landscapes?
These guiding questions fueled a multi-semester urban history research project called, “Before Displacement: An Urban History,” at College of the Holy Cross in 2021-2022. The project presents the work of 50 undergraduate students across two semesters who together documented the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century urban history of a 1.5 mile corridor of Boston land that was cleared for an elevated highway in the 1950s, and subsequently redeveloped as the Rose Kennedy Greenway via the infamous Big Dig. Students researched this land via far-ranging archival materials, and with the support of digitization, community partners, and one another, ultimately compiled their resulting cultural and architectural histories in a collaboratively-built, public-facing website. The project privileges the distinct stories of everyday citizens who resided, owned buildings, operated businesses, or frequented this swath of land, and highlights the specter of displacement as a frequent component of urban change. It also sets a benchmark for archivally-engaged scholarship that can expand collaboratively across time, and which can connect distinct repositories and institutions.
This webinar talk will explore the goals, methods, and prospects for this kind of research project, highlighting the potential for digitization to empower new scales of research and engagement.
Amy Finstein is Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA), where she teaches modern architectural and urban history. Her research unpacks the modern built environment at multiple scales, including the study of high-style houses by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, the history of urban changes that accommodated the automobile, and the stories of individual designers and municipal leaders. Her book, Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-Interstate America (Temple University Press, 2020), received the 2021 Fred B. Kniffen Award from the International Society for Landscape, Place, and Material Culture, and Honorable Mention for the 2021 Kenneth T. Jackson Prize from the Urban History Association. She holds a B.A. in American Studies from Brandeis University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Architectural History from the University of Virginia. In 2024, Finstein received VAF’s Paul E. Buchanan Award for “Before Displacement.”
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