The book offers a history of the modern preservation movement in the United States using a case study approach that looks frankly at the interplay of historic preservation and race in one southern city in the second half of the twentieth century. The successes of Historic Charleston in pioneering novel forms of neighborhood revitalization earned the private non-profit foundation a national reputation in the 1950s and 1960s. But these much-lauded initiatives eventually began to raise concerns about racial displacement and residential gentrification, particularly as the civil rights movement transformed American life. The foundation responded in the 1970s and 1980s by exploring programs for addressing inner city housing and social justice issues in the African-American community, essentially broadening the traditional agenda of the historic preservation movement in imaginative ways.