Description: "Trees are not just natural resources; they are also cultural ones that present unique challenges and opportunities for public historians and local preservation activities. Trees can serve as important objects of memory, recalling past triumphs or tragedies. They can also be the last living witness to important events or community memories. But they are living entities and therefore defy the kind of preservation applicable to buildings and other inanimate historical objects. Their inherent organic fragility can also create significant problems for historical sites; storm and fire damage, intensified by climate-change, highlight the ways that trees-however historical or beloved-can become considerable threats. The fourteen new, previously unpublished essays in this fascinating volume explore the many ways that trees are an integral part of public history practice and sites. The authors draw on a range of approaches and historiographies to look at how memories of race-based hate, patriotic stories, community identities, and changed places all have centered on trees"--
Review Quotes:
"While Branching Out is written primarily by historians intent on showing how trees should be more fully integrated into the work of making history, it is easily accessible for the nonacademic reader. . . . Most of us already have some personal experience not just with trees, but of how they relate to public history, even if we haven't thought of them that way."--Paul Rosenberg, Barn Raiser
"Branching Out is a significant contribution because the field of public history has for too long ignored natural history, in general, and trees, in particular."--Lincoln Bramwell is chief historian of the USDA Forest Service and author of Wilderburbs: Communities on Nature's Edge
"By focusing on trees as witnesses to the past, living embodiments of generations of human memories, and markers of our care (or carelessness) towards the environment, public historians can learn much from Branching Out about better preservation practices and protections."--Leisl Carr Childers, author of The Size of the Risk: Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin