2024 June Preservation ePost | |
Career Opportunities at the OHP
The Office of Historic Preservation (OHP) is hiring State Historians! Apply your excellent organizational, communication, research, and analytical skills to project review, guideline and policy development, and other tasks that advance the stewardship of California's heritage. Enjoy great co-workers and excellent benefits - join our team!
State Historian II (multiple positions; Historian I will be considered)
Application Deadline: June 18, 2024
In the coming weeks we also will be advertising to hire a Senior State Archaeologist. Stay tuned!
Image courtesy of rawpixel.com on Freepik.
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California Historic Places Awards
Our office, in partnership with the California Preservation Foundation (CPF) was pleased to once again participate in National History Day - California (NHD-CA). History Day is an annual event in which students in elementary through high school grades research and create projects based on a specific theme or topic in history. The theme for 2024 was "Turning Points in History." Student projects were judged at the local and state level with some of the winning projects advancing all the way to the national competition in Washington, DC.
As in previous years, the OHP and CPF presented the California Historic Places Award, recognizing projects that are place based. This year the award went to two projects:
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"Beyond the Bridge: A Barrio's Fight for Its Soul" (Senior Level Group Documentary). Students Nicholas Kim, Ronit and Riya Khushu, and Amaya Peterson (Frances Parker School, San Diego) produced a documentary that looks at the issues and community activism that drove the creation of Chicano Park in Barrio Logan, San Diego, and contributed to the park's enduring significance at local, state, and national levels. The students' extensive research included interviews with some of the leading voices and stewards of the park, including Josephine Talamantez, David Favela, Jose Franco Garcia, and others. The students intertwined the interviews with historic and current footage to highlight the park's ongoing importance and contribution to the social, economic, and civic life of the community.
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"East L.A. Walkouts Launch a Movement" (Junior Level Individual Project).
Henry Wiechmann (Sierra Vista Middle School, Irvine) created a rotating exhibit board to present his project on the 1968 East Los Angeles walkouts by Mexican American high school students protesting discriminatory practices and curriculum in their schools. Henry explored key points and actions that highlighted the activism of the Walkout students and the impact they had on the larger Chicano rights movement then and in ensuing years. He designed the exhibit board to visually represent the Walkouts, using corkboard to echo the school bulletin boards on which students posted information about the Walkouts, and making the exhibit rotate to represent the movement of the protests from the classrooms to the streets.
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Congratulations to all the students on their well-deserved awards. We are once again inspired by the creativity and passion these young historians bring to their work!
Images and video link courtesy of the students and NHD-CA.
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New Online Resource from the NPS
“Sustainability, Energy Efficiency, Resilience & Historic Buildings” is a new site of online resources and guidance available through the National Park Service Technical Preservation Services (TPS) website. The new site provides access to TPS Preservation Briefs, SOI Standards and Bulletins, Guidelines on Sustainability and a variety of other resources addressing the sustainability and resilience of historic properties.
Image courtesy of NPS Technical Preservation Services.
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Summer Grant Opportunities
T-Mobile Hometown Grants are accepting the next round of applications. The grants fund projects to preserve, rehabilitate, or construct spaces that help to foster community life and connections.
Application Deadline: June 30, 2024.
History of Equal Rights Grant Program (National Park Service) supports efforts to document, interpret, and preserve sites associated with the struggles for equal rights in America.
Application Deadline: August 20, 2024.
California Humanities Grant Programs (California Humanities) support a variety of efforts by nonprofits and public agencies to preserve and educate about California's richly diverse heritage.
Upcoming deadlines from July 2024 through February 2025 for a variety of grant programs.
Image courtesy of rorozoa on Freepik.
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One of the more visually colorful California properties to achieve National Register of Historic Places designation in recent years is The Women’s Building in San Francisco. The exterior façade and some of the interior spaces of the 1910 masonry building are blanketed in the vibrant colors of Maestrapeace, a mural completed in 1994 by artists Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton, and Irene Perez; calligrapher Olivia Quevedo; and dozens of volunteers. The mural’s artwork communicates the building’s role as a women’s center dedicated to supporting and celebrating women across time and around the world.
The Women’s Building, which had its beginnings and formation as a center in 1978, is one of the first women-owned and women-operated community centers in the United States. Women’s centers, which appeared in various forms and occupied a variety of building types across the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, were especially important manifestations of the nationally significant second wave feminism movement for gender equality and social transformation. A sufficient body of scholarship has developed to establish second wave feminism as a social movement critical to U.S. history. The Women’s Building is exceptional in this history for the scale of its ambitions, the breadth of social issues it has addressed, and as a location where the struggle for women’s rights was linked to additional community struggles, including those of marginalized racial/ethnic communities, LGBTQ communities, immigrants, and others. The property was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on April 30, 2018, and is San Francisco Designated Landmark No. 178.
Photo courtesy of Carol Highsmith Collection, Library of Congress.
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News, Education, and More | |
NAPC Annual Conference
The National Alliance of Preservation Commissions (NAPC) holds their annual FORUM conference from July 31 through August 4, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Florida. The conference provides an opportunity to share and learn the latest information and best practices related to the work of preservation commissions and their staff. Registration is now open.
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Learning Opportunities from the TPS
Summer is a good time to brush up on your preservation knowledge! The Technical Preservation Services (TPS) division of the National Park Service offers a series of free, online trainings on a variety of topics including Sustainability Guidelines, Rehabilitation Guidelines, Incentives, Local Historic Districts, and more. TPS also offers an extensive series of publications offering guidance and how-to knowledge on a broad range of preservation topics and applications.
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Items posted in the ePost are presented as an informational courtesy and do not constitute an endorsement by the Office of Historic Preservation.
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News from California State Parks
Now through an online news feed, you can keep up on the latest news from California State Parks, our parent department. Subscribe Here.
(This will not affect your subscription to the OHP ePost)
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