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About Historic Charleston

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Historic Charleston. Charleston provides an ideal locale for a field school in historic preservation and museum studies for two reasons: the city has a rich and elegant architectural heritage dating to the eighteenth century, and the modern American preservation movement began in Charleston in the early twentieth century. Today the built environment of the city and its nearby plantation landscapes provide an intriguing laboratory for exploration of subjects as varied as preservation of African-American material culture, linkages between historic preservation and environmental concerns, and preservation without gentrification.

Course Description. The field school offers an intensive introduction to the theory and practice of historic preservation in the United States. The course introduces participants to a range of issues, including the economics of preservation, topics in planning and community development, the role of government and non-profit agencies in the preservation process, and historic site interpretation. Visits to historic sites in Charleston and the surrounding Lowcountry region illustrate the preservation issues we discuss. The course has three chief aims: to enhance your general knowledge of the field of historic preservation and museum studies, to examine preservation strategies and the preservation process using Charleston as a case study, and to introduce you to practicing professionals and a variety of historic sites.

Participating Agencies. Among the Charleston area preservation agencies that participate in the field school are the Historic Charleston Foundation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Preservation Office of the City of Charleston, the National Park Service, the Preservation Society of Charleston, the Charleston Museum, and the South Carolina State Historic Preservation Office.

Instructor. Robert Weyeneth is Co-Director of the Public History Program at the University of South Carolina and a faculty member in the Department of History. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his work in public history has involved historic landscape reports in Hawaii, community studies in Washington State, surveys of Cold War sites in South Carolina, and work on historic preservation and the modern civil rights movement. He is the author of a history of historic preservation in Charleston, Historic Preservation for a Living City (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000).

The Public History Program.  The Charleston Preservation Field School is organized by the University of South Carolina, which operates one of the oldest public history programs in the United States. This graduate program offers a Master of Arts degree in Public History with three areas of emphasis: historic preservation, museum studies, and archives. The curriculum combines twenty-one credit hours of training in public history with fifteen credit hours of traditional coursework in history. Since its creation in the 1970's, the Public History Program has established an enviable record of placing its graduates in a wide range of history-related positions.

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