History Professor Receives Book Award For Examination of Historic Charleston

WORCESTER, Mass. – Citing it as a groundbreaking account of how Charleston came to be saved for future generations, judges of the 2006 Historic Preservation Book Prize presented the award to Stephanie E. Yuhl, associate professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross, for her book A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

The Historic Preservation Book Prize is a national award sponsored by the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA.

The prize jurors said that Yuhl's book is no ordinary chronicle of Charleston's construction of a new civic identity between 1920 and 1940. Instead, Yuhl detailed the self-conscious manner in which civic groups, among them the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings, went about determining which parts of the city's heritage would be remembered and how they would be interpreted for visitors. Yuhl calls this process "memory shaping."

The result in Charleston was, as the jurors noted, "a sanitized yet highly marketable version of the city's past" that yielded tremendous economic benefits for city and molded the image of the place so familiar to millions today.

Similarly, the jurors agreed, Yuhl's book will change how the history of U.S. historic preservation is written, calling it a "watershed" that should re-invigorate such scholarship.

"The method Yuhl employs to achieve a study of how memory is selective, shaped, and shaping can enrich our understanding of every aspect of the preservation movement," said Carter L. Hudgins, UMW's Hofer distinguished professor of early American culture and historic preservation.

A member of the Holy Cross faculty since 2000, Yuhl has served as a member of the Campus Center Advisory Board; the Community Standards Board; the Cantor Art Gallery Acquisitions Board; and the Curricular Goals Committee as well as both president and vice president of the Holy Cross chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.