Historic Real Estate

"The origins of American historic preservation have traditionally been told as the story of voluntary organizations like the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association (MVLA)...More recently historians have interrogated the cultural and social dimensions of those efforts, linking them to partisan politics and contests over the meaning of democracy. Whitney Martinko extends this revisionist narrative, beginning more than a half-century before the MVLA to situate early preservation and its verbal and visual rhetoric within contemporary debates over the morality of capitalism and the emergent real-estate market...Historic Real Estate places early American historic preservation into dialogue with the new cultural history of capitalism...Martinko is keenly sensitive to different sorts of politics that intersected in debates over the built environment, and that continue to underpin questions of preservation and memory to this day."—Journal of the Early Republic

"The title of Whitney Martinko’s book, Historic Real Estate, is deceptively modest...Martinko’s gaze encompasses nothing less than the shaping of American institutions of civil society and political economy...This is a cultural history, not a legal, political, or economic one; it makes a case for the salience of culture and capitalism in shaping one another."—Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

"Martinko addresses our lack of historical consciousness about preservation debates in her richly illustrated and argued book. She dissects a series of preservation campaigns from the early national period until the Civil War to reveal the political and economic significance of their discourse and sites...We easily think of preservation as a force of good, and Martinko’s study of early nineteenth-century campaigns helps us to understand why."—Winterthur Portfolio

"Martinko presents the many aspects of considering the historic built environment between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries in such a clear, thoughtful, and often engaging way that it can be easy for readers to lose sight of what a formidable endeavor this study represents. Some of the work discussed is well known to specialists in the history of preservation, but much of it lies in previously unexplored territory, and even finding the material was no mean feat. The result is not only a very rich investigation but also a framework for understanding how Americans have considered their physical heritage."—The Journal of Southern History

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Using an impressive variety of visual, textual, and linguistic sources, [Martinko] reframes common understandings of early American preservation around concepts of virtue and economic morality in the public and private sectors, contending that preservation is a central part of the history of urbanism and capitalism in the United States. In doing so, Martinko joins a small but growing number of preservation scholars whose research challenges long-held beliefs about preservation’s early predilection for aestheticism and nation-building...Martinko’s calls for connection—for communication and recognition of each other across space and time—provide a much needed push to incorporate a more humanistic, unifying, and integrative approach to society’s treatment of the historic built environment.

"—The Public Historian

"The integration of the histories of preservation and capitalism in this book is innovative and analytically nuanced. The volume is handsomely produced, with a readable format, useful illustrations, and an attractive plate section. The overall physical quality of the volume reinforces its substantial contribution to the role of preservation in shaping early national America. Historic Real Estate is a fine book, and it should stand as a valuable new addition to the edifice of scholarship on architecture, economy, and society in the nineteenth-century United States."—Journal of Early American History

"With skill and great insight, Whitney Martinko reveals the centrality of the architectural past to the nation's capitalist future. By steering the forces of creative destruction away from select structures, nineteenth-century Americans ultimately made it easier to shroud real estate development in the mantle of a public-spirited idealism that persists to the present day. The strength of Martinko's analysis is matched only by the production value of this lavishly illustrated volume."—Seth Rockman, Brown University