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Helping humanities professionals tap the power of the region's expansive cultural heritage to enrich community life, inspire visitors, and revitalize the economy.
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President's House The President's House project, which began in 2002, engages MARCH in a complex struggle over how to foster the creation of fair and complete interpretation that uses the highest standards of scholarship, within the highly politicized world of the National Park system. New research published in January 2002 established that President George Washington had sought to build quarters for his stablehands, including several enslaved Africans, in a location that sits today five feet from the door of Philadelphia's new Liberty Bell Center. The published article, by architectural historian Edward Lawler, Jr., also unraveled 150 years of confusion over the exact location of the House and provided detailed analysis of its internal arrangements, its use by both presidential families, and its role as the setting for the development of the Executive Branch. The challenge of interpreting slavery and liberty together on Independence Mall created considerable political, scholarly, and social excitement and tension. MARCH has helped analyze and understand those tensions, and also extend the fruits of these deliberations to support innovative multi-cultural interpretative work throughout the region. In 2005, the city of Philadelphia took over the process, with funding from the city and from Congress. Design teams have been chosen and a process of public meetings and viewings is about to begin, with the goal of unveiling on July 4, 2007.
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