Heritage Conservation in the United States begins to trace the growth of the American historic preservation movement over the last 50 years, viewed from the context of the civil rights and environmental movements. The first generation of the New Preservation (1966-1991) was characterized by the establishment of the bureaucratic structures that continue to shape the practice of heritage conservation in the United States. The National Register of Historic Places began with less than a thousand historic properties and grew to over 50,000 listings. Official recognition programs expanded, causing sites that would never have been considered as either significant or physically representative in 1966 now being regularly considered as part of a historic preservation planning process. The book uses the story of how sites associated with African American history came to be officially recognized and valued, and how that process challenged the conventions and criteria that governed American preservation practice. This book is designed for the historic preservation community and students engaged in the study of historic preservation.

This publication was written as a basic introduction to American preservation for an international audience. It details the preservation movement's origins and development, the main public, private and non-profit entities, financial and policy incentives, preservation's connection with sustainable development and a comparison with the British model. It is one of a series of publications produced by Heritage Strategies International.

Abstract: This study investigates the policy system and political dynamics in heritage conservation at the federal level. Problems, such as dichotomy in heritage, dispersion of administration and authority, and conflicts, often impede the view of the whole field; therefore, I attempt to perceive different types of heritage policy and politics from a big perspective through mapping. Different actors and their programs in the U.S. federal government will be identified, and their roles, policy tools and goals and multiple values will be analyzed. Further, one of the goals of this research is to explore the relationships and impacts among the actors and to pay attention to the communication and collaboration of actors in policy formation and implementation in order to understand the policy making system and dynamics in the field. The U.S. government has developed heritage policy to allow for a minimized input of resources at the federal level while raising the symbolic visibility to maximize the policy impact: the diverse values of heritage tend to impact policy and programs goals, and the types of heritage they relate to wield influence over the chosen policy tools.