About

Brian Whetstone is a public historian and historian of late-twentieth century U.S. urban history. Currently, he is a historian with the National Park Service’s Historic Architecture, Conservation, and Engineering Center (HACE) in Lowell, Massachusetts where he coordinates research and technical documentation projects for national parks in the northeastern United States. Whetstone holds a Ph.D. in History and certificate in Public History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University and a Research Fellow for the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites. As a public historian, his work engages historic preservation’s capacity to promote meaningful social change and inclusion by identifying, researching, and documenting historic sites associated with communities underrepresented or marginalized in traditional preservation documentation. His work has appeared in The Public Historian, the blog of the Urban History Association, and the Columbia Journal of History, in addition to several successful National Register of Historic Places nominations designated in Massachusetts, Nebraska, and Iowa.

Whetstone’s current research encompasses a manuscript project, Renting History: Housing, Labor, and America’s Heritage Infrastructure, which explores the role of renting and the provision of housing at historic sites, museums, and heritage organizations across the twentieth century. Drawing from the experiences of tenants, caretakers, and employees who live onsite at house museums, national parks, and preservation organizations, Renting History situates the tenants of these organizations as key figures in the development of modern public history practice. Challenging conventional definitions of “landlord,” “tenant,” and what it means to do public history, Renting History argues that to understand the labor conditions at public history sites requires understanding the housing practices employed by these same institutions.