HP 799: Ethics in Cultural Resource Management. Summer 2019 Semester. FINAL EXAM
Congratulations. You have completed two years of coursework and you are about to embark on the most exciting segment of your journey through graduate school: researching and writing your thesis. Our program requires all students to take this ethics class in their final semester before moving onto the thesis. Unlike all of your other classes, there is only one graded assignment: this exam. This Pass-Fail exam will determine whether you move onto your thesis and to a professional career in cultural resource management or if you will leave our program without a degree and with our best wishes for success in whatever career track you ultimately decide to follow.
Please answer all of the following questions. Answer completely and in essay form drawing on relevant laws, regulations, and professional codes of conduct and ethics to defend your answers. Continue reading →
In the summer of 1996 I emailed copies of my PhD dissertation to all the members of my committee. My dissertation was about family firms, craft dynasties, and leather tanning in the Catskills and eastern Pennsylvania, c. 1780-1950. Instead of sitting back and waiting to read their comments, I followed up on some research notes I had made about tanneries in the Pittsburgh region. That research ultimately led to several published articles, a couple of Historic American Engineering Record reports, a PBS interview, and several newspaper articles. But those aren’t what this post is about.
At the same time I was researching leather tanning in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, a cultural resource management (CRM) company was doing compliance studies for a highway improvement project in Pittsburgh. The highway project cut through the geographical heart of the space I was researching: Pittsburgh’s North Side and the north shore of the Allegheny River. After I read the CRM company’s report I published a review in my website and shared it with colleagues via various nascent listervs (this was the early days of the Internet before blogs, Twitter, etc.). The original post also was written long before the field of critical heritage studies emerged.
My review and the criticisms of the National Historic Preservation Act compliance stirred up quite a kerfuffle. The fallout included lawsuit threats and a considerable amount of retaliation by the firms involved in the studies and the agencies that reviewed them. Over the years, my website morphed into a blog and the original Pennsylvania Route 28 page ultimately was deleted. The Route 28 research, though, never really disappeared from public view. Every few years I get calls from print and radio reporters with questions about the highway and the area’s history.
I have recently returned to Pittsburgh and to some of my work from the 1990s. New publications and projects are forthcoming, including a recap of a May 2019 walking tour of PennDOT’s mitigation efforts in the Route 28 corridor. But, in the meantime I have decided to resurrect the 1997 web review (with some minor edits).
Carole Ashbridge talks about the history of the Heinz plant in the Route 28 corridor. Allegheny City Society Lost Allegheny City Murals Walking Tour, May 19, 2019.
