About

Brian Whetstone is a public historian and historian of late-twentieth century U.S. urban history. Currently a Princeton-Mellon Fellow in the Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University, he holds a Ph.D. in History and certificate in Public History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching focus on the intersection between the post-1966 historic preservation movement and twentieth-century urban political economy. Whetstone’s book project, Saving Cities: Historic Preservation’s Urban Politics, 1966-1991, explores how preservationists engaged with urban decline after 1966–the year the landmark National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) was passed. 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 National Council on Public History’s blog, 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.