Editors’ Introduction

We opened our last issue with a tribute to a beloved member. Sadly, we do so again. The loss of Barbara Carson hits home. For many of us, Barbara was a diminutive powerhouse of energy and ideas. One of those people who illumined a room, Barbara was a spectacular conversationalist, the result of her imagination and intellect. When the chatter began to dim just a bit, Barbara threw in a curve ball. In the classroom, Susan Kern reminds us in the memorial essay that opens this issue, Barbara’s persistent question was “So what?” Sharing the classroom with Barbara was a delight as the students struggled to observe closely and then to make their observations matter. Less enjoyable—but enormously helpful—was the return of a chapter manuscript with that same question scrawled across the last page. For Barbara, the work we undertake should matter. And, of course, she’s right. That is why we do what we do: because we believe with a deep conviction that it matters.

It was a shared set of convictions that birthed the VAF in the early 1980s and that sustains the vibrancy of this journal three decades later. We believe—then and now—that close attention to the shape of things is an analysis of evidence often overlooked. We also believe that the careful study of the everyday gives access to powerful forces that ebb below the surface of the obvious. In sum, things—places, buildings, objects, landscapes—matter because they shape history. A few years before our founders launched the VAF, Fernand Braudel was writing his sweeping three-volume economic history of the pre-modern world. He opened his trilogy with The Structures of Everyday Life. He, too, was convinced that among the most powerful forces in human history was what he called material life or material civilization: wheat, houses, stoves, costume, water engines, towns. Traditional economic forces—markets, trading circles, capitalism, companies, enterprise—would all wait for volume 2. Braudel, like Carson, believed that things do matter, because they do shape history.

Sometimes, however, our close attention to the shape of things goes too far. We have been known to fetishize the thing and wade too deeply into the waters of “authenticity.” These troubled depths are plumbed by Cindy Falk in her opening Viewpoint essay “When Tourism Is History.” Taking Cooperstown, New York, as her subject, Cindy examines the intersection of historic places and tourism. First, she notes the essential economic potential that tourism can bring to a historic place, especially after a season of flourishing has passed. Places, especially historic places, can become dependent on tourism. But too frequently, we as careful observers and defenders of historic places conceive of the visitation of those places as something apart from the place itself: like visiting the Rosetta Stone, we come, we observe, and we leave. But tourists to historic places need beds to sleep in, lunches to eat, and toilets to use. Tourism also fosters rapid myth making as history becomes commodity. And the novelty of marketing requires constant change. We often resist both as stains on the “authentic.” Cindy’s essay challenges those assumptions and by examining what happens when the material imprint of tourism becomes part of the historic fabric of a place. As the evidence of Cooperstown makes quite plain, the fact of tourism does shape a place and over time leaves an indelible imprint, an imprint that not only shapes, but has meaning. And, as we learned from our recent conference in Jamaica, tourism matters—to economies, in cities, and for the people who live and work in them.

This conviction—that everyday architecture counts—animated the work of John Margolies. Triggered by the recent acquisition by the Library of Congress of nearly thirteen thousand Margolies photographs of everyday commercial architecture, Gabrielle Esperdy examines the theoretical discourse surrounding Margolies’s work from the 1970s on. Traveling across the United States, but focusing especially in the middle ground between the two coasts, Margolies photographed roadside architecture for almost four decades. For Margolies, however, the buildings were not just evocative or quaint. He insisted that they, and his...