The Heritage of Hope in a North American Small Town during the Cold War

Tomorrow, my wife and I will be delivering out paper, “The Heritage of Hope in a North American Small Town during the Cold War” at the 2026 CHAT | Hope conference in Innsbruck, Austria. I’ve blogged about it here before and it is the first official, in person, conference paper that I am giving on the work my wife and I have been doing (with our colleagues in the Grand Forks Historic Preservation Commission) in Grand Forks on the mid-century history and heritage of the city. The paper isn’t conceptually daring, historically expansive, or proffer new ways to think about heritage in the modern world. I think it should probably be best read as “foundational” as in this is what we know and these are some trends that we want to continue to explore. If the paper were a bit longer, I might have liked to add more about the growth of the University of North Dakota, the 1950s era flood ways designed to protect precious housing in the Lincoln Drive neighborhood, and maybe some discussion about…