"From 1849 to the early 1980s, fewer than one hundred highly educated, White, European and American men created what became today's US federal historic preservation policy. Jeremy C. Wells argues that the orthodox historic preservation doctrine that this lineage formulated has too long dominated federal policy and watered down the richness of laypeople's relationships to their own heritage. Instead, Wells envisions a more just and inclusive public preservation policy grounded in community-based participatory practice and the social sciences-especially environmental psychology-to understand and actualize the experiential work of preservation and the "magic of old places" that is its object"-- Provided by publisher.