Renting History: Housing and Labor on Public History’s Front Lines

Brian Whetstone is a historian with the National Park Service’s Historic Architecture, Conservation, and Engineering Center (HACE). He received his PhD in History and Graduate Certificate in Public History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2023. From 2023–24 Whetstone served as a Princeton Mellon Fellow in the Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University and in 2024 served as a research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites. Whetstone is currently working on a larger monograph project that traces the intersection of housing and labor practices at museums, historic sites, and national parks in the United States from which this article is drawn. Portions of this research were generously supported by the Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University.