Bozeman Magazine

MOR is pleased to host the Extreme History Project lecture series that encourages public understanding of the way our history has shaped our present. Speakers will take a fresh look at intriguing historical topics.

Building Community Through Historic Preservation with Janet Ore
Historic preservation arose as a movement to protect built environments that provided the tangible expressions of identity.  Americans realized that in times of rapid change, places invested with history, memory, and emotion gave them a sense of history that could be lost when the physical markers of the past were eradicated. For many today, their multicentered lives have impelled them to seek places where the symbols of a more rooted, seemingly less complex, past remain. Bozeman now stands at this juxtaposition.  The city’s historic neighborhoods and setting attract mobile Americans desiring the charm of an idyllic small-town past.  Yet the changes these new arrivals make threaten the historic environment that gives Bozeman and its residents their identity. Historic preservation provides a way to manage this tension.  Its job is to articulate the histories that define the place, to identify the historic buildings and landscapes that represent these histories, and to find ways to accommodate for change while keeping the city’s distinct character.  The goal must be to conserve what David Glassberg calls “a sense of history”—unique places where personal and public histories have interacted over the decades to produce communities rich in stories of change and belonging.

Biography: Janet Ore
After graduating from Carroll College in 1980, Janet Ore received an MA in public history from Washington State University and a PhD in US history from the University of Utah.  She has authored The Seattle Bungalow: People and Houses, 1900-1940 and numerous articles, reviews, and reports. She now teaches public history at Montana State University after many years in the History Department at Colorado State University (CSU).  In the 1980s, she worked as Butte-Silver Bow Community Historic Preservation Officer and has remained active in historic preservation, serving on city and state preservation review boards, conducting architectural inventories, and supervising many historic preservation research projects for the National Park Service through her affiliation with CSU’s Public Lands History Center.