This spring, as the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence approached, USC Heritage Conservation students explored this milestone from a West Coast perspective. The season finale of Save As welcomes back Dr. Laura Dominguez (MHC '12)—public humanities scholar, heritage conservation leader, and newest member of the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission.

Laura taught a documentation class based on her work on LA2026, a USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute initiative exploring Southern California’s relationship with the founding of the United States. Co-host Cindy Olnick spoke with Laura and students Leslie Madrigal, Jade Mothé, and Isabella “Bella” Ryan. They discussed reading scholarship “against the grain” to find untold stories, researching sites from early Los Angeles, and connecting Indigenous history and civil rights to themes of commemoration and belonging—all of which will inform the future of our field and our nation.

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Sea levels are rising ever faster in the face of climate change, and by the year 2100 many historic properties could be underwater. Recent Heritage Conservation graduate Alex Clark wrote her thesis on the Adamson House in Malibu, built in 1929 and famed for its Malibu Potteries tile. In her thesis, Heritage at the Water's Edge. Adaptive Release at the Adamson House, Alex outlines the site’s layered history and current use as a museum. Alex tells producer Willa Seidenberg how coastal erosion, storms, king tides, and projected sea-level rise could place the house and parts of the coastal highway underwater in a few short decades. She evaluates past and proposed mitigations and advocates for “adaptive release,” or actively managing the inevitable decay or loss of a historic site.

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Recent USC Heritage Conservation graduate Eliza Jane Franklin wrote her master’s thesis on a deeply personal topic: lynching. Not just the act of physical violence that took her great-grandfather’s life in 1922, but “the act of terrorizing and/or controlling individuals’ or a community’s heritage,” which she named “heritage lynching.” In this episode, co-host Trudi Sandmeier speaks with Eliza Jane about her thesis, Re-Membering Heritage Lynchings, Hoop Skirts, and History: A Southernbelle Radical’s Unveiling of the Daughters of Dixie’s Role in the Legacy of Violence in Preservation in Eufaula, AL. Eliza Jane discusses how White people sustain a Lost Cause narrative in her hometown, how she is reclaiming her heritage, and how people can do the same in their own communities.

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