John H. Sprinkle’s Saving Spaces: Historic Land Conservation in the United States contributes to scholarship on historic preservation and land conservation. In so doing, it adds in a meaningful way to an on-going, interdisciplinary examination of both these topics. Beginning in the 1970s, a growing body of scholarship—combined with the “new” social history’s emphasis on the ordinary and everyday—drew increasing attention to the historical and cultural significance of rural, historic landscapes. That scholarship contributed to a transformation of the philosophy, and an expansion of the boundaries, of historic preservation to embrace those rural, historic landscapes. Robert Z. Melnick, a historic landscape architect, published under contract with the National Park Service (NPS) Cultural Landscapes: Rural Historic Districts in the National Park System (1984), a seminal work in bringing rural landscapes into the field of historic preservation.

In 1989 (revised 1999), Melnick co-authored NPS’s Bulletin 30: Guidelines for Evaluation and Documenting Rural...

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