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How Can America’s 250th Anniversary Commission Promote Tourism? By Connecting With National Heritage Areas and Regional Public Universities

stefanie benjamin

The Alliance of National Heritage Areas 2022 Spring Meeting included a live music experience at GRAMMY Museum Mississippi at Delta State University (left) and a closing dinner presentation on Civil Rights heritage preservation at Mississippi Valley State University (center and right). Both of these Regional Public Universities are key Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area partners. Photo credit: The Delta Center for Culture and Learning

Rolando Herts, Ph.D. & Tourism RESET Fellow, Director, Delta Center for Culture and Learning & Executive Director, Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area

article Summary

The America 250 project suggests that cultural heritage tourism will be “essential in Americans’ engagement in the semiquincentennial, with national and international visitors welcomed into every region and community of the country.” The now precarious national commission and foundation-driven project was originally established to commemorate the United States’ 250th anniversary in 2026.

In a March 2023 Wall Street Journal article, Rosie Rios, President Biden’s appointed chair of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, is said to be renaming “America 250” to “America’s Founding.” Chair Rios envisions that America’s Founding will “encourage ‘the American public to suggest their own ideas, tell their own stories, share interesting narratives about their own experiences, about their own communities.’”

The various alleged organizational mismanagement controversies that have led to Chair Rios’ rebranding effort will not be rehashed here. Rather, this article presents evidence that America’s Founding – or America 250, if that moniker endures – can promote cultural heritage tourism nationally by tapping into a well-established, yet often overlooked, institutional network of cultural heritage storytellers: National Heritage Areas (NHAs) and Regional Public Universities.

National Heritage Areas are “doing the work already”

The Alliance of National Heritage Area’s diversity, equity, and inclusion position paper highlights several examples of National Heritage Areas’ authentic storytelling and community empowerment work.

NHAs are Congressionally-designated lived-in cultural heritage landscapes that tell diverse American stories through community-based tourism, education, interpretation, preservation, and advocacy.

In January 2023, President Biden signed the National Heritage Area Act into law. The law has established an official system of National Heritage Areas (NHAs) within the National Park Service, as well as reauthorized 45 NHAs for 15 years and authorized seven new NHAs increasing the total number of NHAs to 62. With the new law, Congress has the latitude to fund all NHAs up to $1 million annually, an unprecedented measure since the first NHAs were designated in the 1980s under the Reagan Administration.

This long-term organizational sustainability victory positions NHAs to continue their critical cultural heritage development work in 35 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Much of this work involves empowering socioeconomically marginalized rural and urban communities to “tell their own stories,” as Chair Rios has stated that the America’s Founding project will do. NHAs’ commitment to community storytelling resonates with a core principle of cultural heritage tourism development: create authentic experiences that include authentic voices from living culture keepers and their descendants. 

The Alliance of National Heritage Areas (ANHA) is the leading coalition amplifying NHAs’ authentic storytelling and community empowerment work. NHAs’ cultural heritage storytelling projects are well documented in the ANHA’s six-volume Connecting the Heart & Soul of American Communities magazine series. First published in 2017, Heart & Soul has become a comprehensive storytelling repository for NHAs and the communities that they serve, as it highlights an array of on-the-ground tourism development projects including:

The Alliance of National Heritage Area’s recent volume of Heart & Soul magazine focused on community resilience in the aftermath of COVID-19 and other national challenges.

  • The Last Green Valley National Heritage Corridor and Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor assessing and ensuring recreational accessibility for disabled visitors and residents in Connecticut and Massachusetts;

  • The Mississippi Gulf Coast NHA and Cache La Poudre NHA in Colorado stimulating  tourism business development and ambassadorship among locals who want to interpret and share their communities’ cultural heritage; and

  • The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor preserving African American land, language, and culinary traditions for community members and tourists in the Carolinas, Florida, and Georgia.

Heart & Soul has been a crucial component of ANHA’s Congressional advocacy strategy, which ultimately led to passage of the National Heritage Area Act.

Building on the Heart & Soul model and its effectiveness, Brandi Roberts, ANHA board member and executive director of Great Basin NHA in Nevada and Utah, galvanized nearly 30 NHAs across 23 states to collaborate on a $100,000 Inclusive Storytelling grant from the National Park Foundation. The funded project entitled “250 Stories for America’s 250th” will see these NHAs  research, develop, and share with the public 250 ‘deferred stories’ focused on equality and justice, women, people of African descent, and indigenous populations.

In light of Heart & Soul and the “250 Stories for America’s 250th” project, ANHA chair Sara Capen, who also serves as executive director of Niagara Falls NHA in upstate New York, recently shared that:

National Heritage Area and Regional Public University partnerships

Of the 62 NHAs that currently exist in the U.S., there are four NHAs – all of which are located in the National Park Service’s Southeast Region – that are managed by Regional Public Universities (RPUs). The American Association of State Colleges and Universities acknowledges RPUs as stewards of place that are deeply connected to the geographic and cultural sites where they are located and serve. 

  • Alabama Black Belt NHA at the University of West Alabama (UWA)

  • Mississippi Delta NHA at Delta State University (DSU)

  • Tennessee Civil War NHA at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU)

  • Muscle Shoals NHA at the University of North Alabama (UNA)

National Park Service director Chuck Sams (center) celebrates signing of the National Heritage Act into federal law with Alliance of National Heritage Areas leadership, including Chair Sara Capen (right center).  Photo credit: Alliance of National Heritage Areas

The management relationship between these NHAs and RPUs represents a powerful example of institutional mission alignment between cultural heritage development partners. Together, NHAs and RPUs provide a well-established infrastructure for commemorating America’s 250th anniversary through various tourism, education, interpretation, preservation, and advocacy projects that NHAs and RPUs already do and/or are already planning to implement.

While the majority of the 62 NHAs do not have management partnerships with RPUs, 48 of them (nearly 80%) have one or more RPUs located within their boundaries. The Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges (ARRC) maintains an online mapping database that classifies 472 of U.S. higher education institutions as RPUs. A visual cross-referencing between ARRC’s map and the National Park Service’s NHA map suggests that NHAs and RPUs could collaboratively serve as administrative centers for 250th anniversary commemoration programs, if provided ample financial and human capital resources from Chair Rios’ America’s Founding project.

Studies conducted by the ARRC find that RPUs are important cultural hubs, especially those located in rural regions that tend to organize cultural heritage festivals, offer musical performances, and feature the only museums in their counties.

Orphan and McClure’s 2019 case study provides more specific insights about how RPUs help to stimulate cultural capital – and other forms of community capital (e.g., social, political, human, natural, financial) – in rural regions like Appalachia. The cultural capital framing illuminates RPUs as placemakers for rituals, stories, and language celebrated through art, museums, festivals, and regional customs, all of which are key cultural heritage tourism assets.

An opportunity to tell rural American stories

When viewed as a collective, NHAs and RPUs represent a nationwide cultural heritage tourism development network. This network touches many rural regions that have experienced steady declines in population, educational attainment, and economic opportunity during the 20th and 21st centuries. Tapping into the NHA-RPU network could help visitors and residents rediscover, reclaim, and reconnect with rural America. Moreover, engaging NHAs and RPUs in the storytelling process could ensure that historically marginalized voices from rural communities are included and heard. 

The Alabama Black Belt, Appalachia, and the Lower Mississippi Delta are storied rural regions etched into America’s cultural consciousness as the homes of Bluegrass and country music, the Blues, and pivotal events that changed American history like the Flood of 1927, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights Movement. These rural areas also have struggled with persistent poverty, generational outmigration, and other regional development challenges for decades. Towards addressing these challenges, the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and Delta Regional Authority (DRA) are two multi-million-dollar federal commissions that support cultural heritage tourism and placemaking as vital regional economic development strategies.

The ARC and DRA service footprints are teeming with nationally recognized cultural assets as indicated by the sheer percentage of NHAs that exist within their geographic boundaries. At least a third of the 62 NHAs, including the four NHAs managed by RPUs, are located within the boundaries of the DRA and ARC service regions.

The Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area’s Delta Jewels Oral History Partnership interpreted stories of African American church mothers who lived through the Jim Crow Era and the Civil Rights Movement. The program engaged over 1,000 residents and visitors through statewide community gatherings, including gatherings hosted by five of Mississippi’s six Regional Public Universities: Alcorn State, Delta State, Jackson State, Mississippi Valley State, and University of Southern Mississippi.

Tennessee Civil War NHA at Middle Tennessee State University and Muscle Shoals NHA at the University of North Alabama are among approximately 15 NHAs located in the ARC footprint, which encompasses 420 counties across 13 states. Alabama Black Belt NHA at the University of West Alabama and Mississippi Delta NHA at Delta State University are among 7 NHAs in the Delta Regional Authority (DRA) footprint, which encompasses 252 counties across 8 states.

In 2020, ARC’s grants invested nearly $6.4 million in 23 regional cultural heritage tourism projects. DRA’s 2023 Regional Development Plan IV highlights a strategic emphasis on creative placemaking and tourism-related projects that support regional brand development and celebrate local culture, including events and festivals. 

Given the ARC and DRA’s funding commitment to cultural heritage tourism, NHAs and RPUs together could be an attractive grants investment network for these federal agencies, especially as we approach America’s 250th anniversary commemorations in 2026.