University of Washington

History in Action A HISTORY ALUMNA TACKLES THE CHALLENGE OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING UW HISTORIANS SHAPE FUTURE OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE National Park units are among the nation's most important public history sites. Each year, millions of visitors from around the country and around the world explore landscapes as diverse as Gettysburg National Military Park, Manzanar National Historic Site, Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, and the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, to name only a few. Current and former students from the University of Washington are making a significant contribution to NPS history programs, shaping and reshaping interpretation, preservation and outreach efforts at the local, regional, and national levels. In January 2017, Turkiya Lowe (PhD, 2010) was named the National Park Service's new Chief Historian and Deputy Federal Preservation Officer. Lowe is the first woman and first African American to hold the position. She has close to two decades of experience working in the NPS, and most recently served as Southeast Region chief historian and chief for the Southeast Region's Cultural Resources Research and Science Branch. In 2016, she also held the position of Acting Superintendent of Cane River Creole National Historical Park in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Another recent UW graduate, Christopher Johnson (PhD, 2015), is a historian in the Park Service's Pacific West Regional Office in Seattle. Over the past several years, Johnson has completed multiple historic KAYLA SCHOTT-BRESLER (MA, 2013) Ask a Seattle resident about the most pressing issue confronting the city and chances are the response will be a lack of affordable housing. Residents, workers, real estate companies, politicians, nonprofit organizations, environmental activists, and planners are all engaged in a debate over the future of the region. And so, too, is a historian – Kayla Schott-Bresler (MA, 2013) Schott-Bresler graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles in 2009. She worked on health and nutrition policy in Eugene, Oregon, for three years, before moving to Seattle in 2012 to begin her studies at the UW. In her course work and research, Schott-Bresler concentrated primarily on the 20th-century United States. Housing policy, in particular, became her focus. In her words, "I wanted to better understand how policy influenced politics. I began to see how the 'hidden welfare state' acted as a structural force obscuring the positive role of government in people's lives." After completing her degree, Schott-Bresler began work at the Housing Development Consortium (HDC) of Seattle–King County, a nonprofit affordable housing policy and advocacy organization. At HDC, she worked with city governments and advocates on land-use and funding policies aimed at increasing the supply of affordable housing. She currently is a public health analyst at Skagit County Public Health, where she manages housing, homelessness, and community development programs. In her words, "The content knowledge I developed as an undergraduate and graduate student provided a strong foundation for affordable housing advocacy and policy development. By picking a technical and practical topic for my master's thesis, I was able to speak the lingo of the industry, while also having a framework for understanding the broader forces influencing affordable housing policy." continues on next page CYRUS FORMAN (AT RIGHT), CURRENT PHD CANDIDATE AND FORMER LEAD INTERPRETIVE RANGER AT THE AFRICAN BURIAL GROUND NATIONAL MONUMENT. D E P A R T M E N T O F H I S T O R Y   5 history matters

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