2024 Early Career Faculty Research and Creative Work Grant Winner

Michelle G. Magalong, Ph.D.

Blazing a Trail: Navigating the National Register and Historic Preservation for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders

NCPE Member Program: University of Maryland

Project Summary:

In 2012, the National Park Service launched their Heritage and History Initiatives with “the goal of furthering the representation of diverse stories within the National Historic Landmarks Program and elsewhere within the National Park Service.  The initiatives extended the reach of documentation, listing, and designation of historic places to better reflect the full spectrum of people, events, and experiences that have contributed to building the nation.”  With this initiative set in place, NPS launched the Asian American Pacific Islander Theme Study in 2012.  This project will uncover the administrative history of this work and its subsequent impact.  Did these theme studies impact its intended audience? Did the AAPI Theme Study impact or influence their aims to encourage more nominations to the National Register and engage more historic preservation work (and awareness) in AAPI communities to locate, research, and document sites associated with the history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders?  How did the Underrepresented Communities Grant aid or encourage nominations?  Did AAPI communities, or historic preservation professionals, work on diversifying the National Register?

This project aims to develop a sole-author book manuscript, “Blazing a Trail: Navigating the National Register and Historic Preservation for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders” that traces the administrative history of the development of the NPS AAPI Theme Study and its subsequent impacts on local and state historic preservation and community efforts with research methodologies including in-depth interviews with historic preservationists and public historians, participant observation, and archival history.