The rise of public interest in the conservation of heritage sites, plus a somewhat natural propensity towards understanding the weight of our history has meant that the preservation movement and the preservation ethic permeate all levels of our society and government. Our success in the field is hard to measure and even harder to describe.

The following discussion of preservation in the United States was written by Gustavo Araoz, Executive Director of US/ICOMOS. Scroll down the page, or select one of these links to go to a specific section.

As in many countries of the New World, early preservation in the United States was closely linked to the establishment of a national identity by focusing on those sites that were linked to the early settlement and independence movement, especially sites associated with the life of George Washington and to a lesser degree with other important figures of that period. Unlike other countries, however, the will to conserve and monumentalize such sites did not issue from either the central or the local government, but rather, from local citizen groups who valued the cultural, historic and patriotic sites that lay in their immediate community. For decades, the government offered little interest, no assistance, and no official recognition to any of these sites. Thus, from its very origin, the preservation movement in the United States has been characterized by being a grassroots effort driven at the local level and one that evolved in isolation from outside influences, responding only to perceived local needs. Until the middle of the 20th century, there was little communication with preservationists from other countries, and the evolution of the international preservation theories that had been evolving since the early 19th century were unknown in the United States until the 1960s.

The emphasis on the associative patriotic values linked to the early independence movement and the colonial period acquired a new sense of urgency with the large immigrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the prevailing Anglo-Saxon and protestant ethic of colonial and earlier settlers were perceived to be endangered by the massive influx of eastern and central Europeans, plus Catholics, Jews, Orthodox and others. Heritage sites were recruited for their didactic potential in inculcating the newcomers with the values of a dominant culture whose carriers were dangerously diminishing in their proportion to the overall population. This use of heritage meant a strong reliance on reconstruction and museography that could easily interpret and convey to the general public the social values that led to their original construction. As the preservation movement became more sophisticated, historic accuracy in reconstruction gained importance, and the field came to be dominated by historians rather than architects as was the case elsewhere. The work begun in the 1920s in Colonial Williamsburg under the sponsorship of John Rockefeller, is, of course, the pinnacle of this process, as well as our primary example of both historically accurate reconstruction and heritage in the service of a political message.

Certainly, there were a number of governmental efforts during this period, including the establishment of the National Park Service, the declaration of a number of national monuments by presidential decree and the passing of several federal protective laws mostly dealing with archaeological sites. While they may seem weak by today's standards, they set up a strong foundation for the work that was to follow. Other important actions of the 1930s had a profound pioneering impact on the preservation movement. Local preservation ordinances were established in New Orleans, Charleston and Alexandria. At the federal level, President Roosevelt's economic recovery programs put unemployed architects to work documenting historic buildings all over the country, an initiative that gave rise to popular awareness of our traditional architecture and established the Historic American Buildings Survey.

•  See current activities of the HABS program

•  View the HABS collection online at the Library of Congress website

It was not until the 1960s that the modern preservation movement began to emerge very rapidly in the United States as the result of a sequence of important national and global events. It began in the 1930s with the Great Depression, bringing on extreme poverty to many of our people and halting building construction for almost a decade, only to be followed by the global conflict of World War II, when our entire national attention was focused on wartime military production. Thus, the country emerged into the early 1950s with a severe building and housing shortage, yet a vision of the future that the same technology that had made military victory possible could now serve the civilian needs of the population. This population had unprecedented aspirations of well-being and comfort whose seeds had been planted in the 1939 New York World's Fair.

The zeal for modernization in all aspects of our life has been well-documented, and also is a process that was shared by many countries in the world. We now look on this era as one of a naive optimism perpetually under the cloud of possible nuclear annihilation, and whose lighter side has been caricatured by the Jetsons. A darker side emerged, however, with the wholesale destruction of entire traditional urban neighborhoods in the name of modern urban renovation which only worsened urban blight. As landmarks tumbled and freeways worked their way into the heart of our cities, many clamored for a saner approach to managing our built environment. Thus, the evolution of the preservation movement was once again driven by grassroots groups concerned with the immediate well-being of their communities.

The central protagonist that catalyzed the local concerns was the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which had been chartered and funded by Congress as a non-governmental organization in 1946 with the objective of leading the private sector's involvement in heritage conservation. By 1964, it became clear that new federal protective legislation was needed, and that the federal government needed to control the negative impact of its own actions on the country's heritage. In 1965, a high level congressional delegation visited major historic European cities to understand how conservation and development could be conjoined. The trip planning was a direct result of the contacts that Robert Garvey had established in the foundational meeting of ICOMOS in Poland. The result of this vast effort was the drafting of a new law by the National Trust that was adopted in 1966: the National Historic Preservation Act.

The 1960s, then, marked the opening of the internationalization of preservation thinking in the United States. As a clear manifestation of this new trend, the Venice Charter provided the doctrinal foundation for the Secretary of Interior's Standards for Historic Preservation. It was also in the 1960s that US/ICOMOS was founded, and the decade also saw the first wave of Americans acquiring international training by attending ICCROM.

The Preservation Structure in the United States