Historical Marker Plaques
Historical markers recognize and define historic preservation within communities across the United States. Evaluation, each marker needs to uphold acceptable standards, including neutrality and analysis, to avoid bias or errors. Communities thrive to keep their heritage as the purpose continues to shape and impact history that brought evaluation to preserve the balanced narrative. Historical markers allow education to be pursued with words literally marked on a board standing with poles on the streets.
“History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future..”
Robert Penn Warren1
General Information
Historic preservation focuses on historical contexts that involve the “political, social, cultural, and economic environment”2 in which it is still shaping the method on how history must be portrayed in front of audiences. It also focuses on the handling of the recognition and management that ties the properties that are held within historic resources, whether they are public or private within origins. It is generally believed that historic preservation is a mechanism that would prevent certain things from either aging or disintegrating. However, it is mostly about overseeing change in the present that has both past and future eras with expectations of historical interpretations and transitions.3 In the United States, historic preservation has a role in gathering individuals and communities to set up strategies for “remembering the past and preparing for a sustainable future.”4 Historic preservation has a prescriptive role in protecting the depiction of the old structures and materials that are considered to be noteworthy for heritage management to keep it intact by utilizing available measures to preserve recognition.5
Debates and conversations regarding historic preservation involve a provision for the management of historic properties, and often creates a flashpoint that occurs among the court of public opinion about historical markers and historic preservation to put a word coming from two sides of the story.6 Regardless of opinions, historic preservation helps ensure that historical markers are created to set up recognition for past individuals, events, and properties.
Navigation of the Exhibit
On the bottom, there are buttons that lead to pages comprising information regarding details of historical markers and historic preservation, along with the manufacturing foundries and available historical organizations that contributed to the marker narratives. Most pages, at the bottom of them, contain more than one button that lead towards other pages have information regarding the subject, while some comprise hide/show detail features that have links towards other sources that were used in the project, or whether people need to read more by expanding sources.
Buttons towards informative pages
Footnotes:
- Goodreads. “A Quote by Robert Penn Warren,” n.d. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/656593-history-cannot-give-us-a-program-for-the-future-but
- Travis Ratermann, Arkansas Statewide Preservation Plan 2023-2032 (Little Rock: Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, 2023), 21
- Karin Wulf, “How Historic Preservation Shaped the Early United States,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 14, 2020, –https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-historic-preservation-shaped-early-united-states-180974871/
- Norman Tyler et al. eds., Historic Preservation: An Introduction to Its History, Principles, and Practice, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 1.
- Ibid
- Karin Wulf, “How Historic Preservation Shaped the Early United States,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 14, 2020, –https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-historic-preservation-shaped-early-united-states-180974871/; James W. Loewen, Lies across America: What our historic sites get wrong (New York: The New Press, 2019), 15, 17.
Historical Marker Plaques of Arkansas 