Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
The Power of Place,by Dolores Hayden, offers an analysis of the public art, public history, urban history, and social history of Los Angeles resulting from the collaborative Power of Place project. The project, begun in 1984, is comprised of historians, artists, planners, and geographers with the central goal of providing opportunities to learn about the city from the perspective of the forgotten or overlooked ethnic enclaves. Hayden divides the study into two sections, emphasizing in the first section the need to recognize the place of African Americans, women workers, and immigrants in building and contributing to the cityís political and economic climate. The second section discusses specific projects of the Power of Place organization. Here, the lives of nineteenth-century African American midwife, Biddy Mason, Latina political workers, and the contributions of Japanese Americans emerge in bold relief. The study is suggestive for the duplicable models of the project; the references to funding opportunities for projects of this nature and caliber; as well as, its examples of how the projects evolved. Hayden is careful to indicate the successes as well as the failures of other projects undertaken by Power of Place, providing a realistic and practical model for scholars to follow. [P. Williams]