I co-developed a 2024 toolkit, “History and Hope: Interpreting the Roots of Our Climate Crisis” for the National Park Service to expand strategies for bringing the climate emergency into interpretive programs. History & Hope offers strategies for using people-centered stories to expand understanding of the roots of climate change and to inspire climate action. The July 2024 webinar unveiling this project drew over 800 registrants.
Public historians can help scientists, journalists and others find effective ways to convey the scale and urgency of the challenge posed by climate change. The narratives we craft can reveal histories of loss and resilience, deepen understanding of and connections to places undergoing dramatic (and subtle) change, and reinforce the importance of understanding legacies of environmental injustice in addressing the effects of our climate emergency. In addition to making the impact of climate change clear, historical interpretation can provide examples of instances, where society reorganized to face immense challenges. Narratives like these can also allow visitors to envision their own roles in addressing our climate emergency with the knowledge, urgency, and hope required.
My 2022 Fulbright Specialist Project in the UK and a 2024 consultation in Berlin both focussed on how heritage sites, especially those significant to industrial history, can connect their stories to climate change.
I co-facilitated a working group “Public Historians in Our Climate Emergency” at the 2021 annual conference of the National Council on Public History (with David Glassberg of UMass, Amherst), which resulted in a series of essays for NCPH's "History@Work.".
While directing the Rosie the Riveter Memorial project, Graves realized that much of the city retained its wartime built environment; yet the community had largely forgotten its distinguished and complex WWII history. She researched places that told the story of Richmond’s transformation from a small city to a bustling wartime boomtown including defense worker housing, daycare centers and schools built for shipbuilders’ children, factories and businesses that converted to defense production, and civil defense stations. Graves shared these stories with National Park Service (NPS) staff and worked with them to develop a feasibility study for a new national park in Richmond and laid the groundwork for City officials to adopt a preservation ordinance to protect their newly-valued historic resources.
The park, a partnership between NPS and the community, tells the complex story of social change during WWII when women, people of color, and others found new opportunities and old barriers needed to be renegotiated.
Since Congressional authorization of the Park in 2000, Graves has continued researching, planning and interpreting aspects of the Park and city and was a lead historian for exhibits at the Park Visitor and Education Center. She was honored by NPS and the city with their inaugural “Home Front Award.”
The National Park Visitor Center opened in 2013 in a portion of the historic Ford Assembly Building. Graves was lead historian on the team developing the permanent exhibits there. Photo: National Park Service
This photo of a multi-racial welding crew was donated as part off the community memory-gathering process Graves helped lead. Photo: National Park Service
The Richmond Kaiser shipyards were the world’s largest and most productive shipbuilding faculty in the world during WWII. Photo: UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library
National Park ranger, Betty Reid Soskin, orienting visitors to exhibits that convey the social complexity of the home front years. Photo: National Park Service
A portion of the Visitor Center exhibits pointing to long-term changes wrought by WWII. Photo: Donna Graves
The Rosie the Riveter Memorial, which helped inspire the national park, continues to be a draw for visitors and an important interpretive feature for park rangers. Photo: National Park Service
The City of Richmond, CA engaged Graves as they considered how to honor the women who worked during WWIIn at the Kaiser Shipyards, the most productive shipbuilding facility in the world for a few short years.
Graves led the competition to design the first national memorial to women’s efforts on the WWII home front, for a waterfront park on the former site of the Kaiser Shipyards. The competition was won by artist Susan Schwartzenberg and landscape architect Cheryl Barton. Meant to draw parallels between the acts of constructing ships and reconstructing memories, the Memorial's form is that of a vessel in the process of being built.
While the design process moved forward, Graves initiated a range of strategies to engage the community including a newsletter, a website, a youth program for high school students to interview former shipyard workers, an oral history project, community memory-gathering events, and a public forum on commemoration and design.
The project received continued positive press from local, regional and national media - a rare benefit for a city known more for its poverty, crime and toxic industries.
Sited in a city park at the former site of Shipyard Number 2, the memorial design drew from shipbuilding blueprints to inspire sculptural elements along a walkway the length of a Liberty Ship. Photo: Lewis Watts
The Memorial design employs abstracted forms of Liberty ships in sculptures reminiscent of the prefabricated vessels assembled by shipyard workers. Photo: Lewis Watts
Graves developed a partnership event with California Department of Employment that brought young people to the Memorial to learn more about union jobs and to meet real life "Rosies." Members of Tradeswomen, an organization that works to bring more women into trade unions, were trained to serve as guides. Photo: Donna Graves
Visitors continue to leave mementoes at the memorial, such as this military insignia placed at the knees of a woman riveter. Photo: Lewis Watts
Imagery incorporated into the sculpture drew from local and national archives, as well as community engagement events organized by the project. Photo: Lewis Watts
The memorial walkway serves as a timeline for events on the home front and features brief statements from interviews conducted with women who worked at the Richmond shipyards. Photo: Susan Schwartzenberg
Graves has participated in several projects focussed on LGBTQ+ history in California. San Francisco is internationally recognized as an epicenter of LGBTQ culture and civil-rights movements. To promote awareness of this important part of local history and to establish future LGBTQ landmarks, Graves and co-author Shayne Watson developed a comprehensive, city-wide historic context statement for LGBTQ history. The report has received national attention and has supported other communities as they work to document and interpret their own history.
The project received the California Preservation Foundation’s Excellence in Historic Preservation Award and the California Governor’s Historic Preservation Award. Graves and Watson were invited to contribute a chapter on San Francisco for the National Park Service's LGBTQ America: A National Theme Study on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer History (2016).
With funding from the National Trust for Historic Preservation the team created a statewide, crowd-sourced mapping project and partnered with StoryCorps to capture personal stories associated with LGBTQ sites. These projects promoted robust inter-generational community dialogue.
Graves developed a touring exhibit on home front LGBTQ experiences that opened at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park Visitor Center—the first time NPS included this theme as focus for an exhibit at a Park Visitor Center.
Graves recently nominated two local sites to the National Register of Historic Places: The Women's Building and the Japanese YWCA. Both of these buildings have rich, multi-layered histories that hold LGBTQ associations and complicate traditional ways of assessing areas of significance and period of significance.
Story Gathering Event for Citywide Historic Context Statement held at The Women's Building. Photo: Shayne Watson
The Historic Context Statement can be downloaded here
"Our Stories" Workshop at LGBTQ Community Center was organized to ensure better representation of transgender and POC people’s histories. Photo: Donna Graves
We collaborated with StoryCorps to gather recorded interviews representing a range of LGBTQ experiences. Donna Graves recorded interviews with activist Roma Guy, and Diane Jones, one of the first AIDS nurses in San Francisco.
Flyer announcing statewide effort to gather and map California’s LGBTQ histories.
"Pinning" Workshop for California Pride at California Historical Society. Photo: Shayne Watson
Graves led a project to document and interpret LGBTQ stories of the WWII home front for Rosie the Riveter after successfully arguing that the park needed to add the contributions and experience of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people during the war years to park interpretation. The exhibit drew national attention and press coverage.
The San Francisco Women’s Building, founded by a predominately lesbian group of women, has been a center for organizing among LGBTQ people, ethnic/racial communities, immigrants, people with disabilities and other marginalized communities of the Bay Area. Photo: Bruce Rinehart
As Carmen Vazquez, one of The Women’s Building’s early leaders states, the building was “a critical site for the development of the women’s movement in San Francisco that had a strong foundation in a progressive race-class analysis.” Photo: The Oakland Museum of California
Built in 1932, the Japanese YWCA held a wide range of events associated with social justice. After all people of Japanese ancestry were forcibly removed from the West Coast and incarcerated, the American Friends Service Committee leased the building. In 1954 it hosted the first national convention of the Mattachine Society, the groundbreaking homosexual rights organization.
In 1943, young African American activist Bayard Rustin (2nd from right) ran campaigns and workshops on housing and civil rights from the Japanese YWCA building. Later, Rustin was a central organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. Although he was forced to be extremely discrete about his homosexuality., Rustin has been reclaimed as a major figure in LGBTQ history.
Preserving California’s Japantowns was an ambitious project designed to expand understanding of Japanese American history by documenting what remains of nearly fifty Japantowns erased by federal policy during WWII when all people of Japanese descent on the West Coast were forcibly removed and incarcerated.
As part-time project director, working with a part- time project manager Jill Shiraki, Graves realized the project scope necessitated enlisting and training over 70 volunteers to survey these historic communities and to begin building support for historic preservation and interpretation of these sites.
Begun as a “simple” historic resource survey, the project required extensive original research and expanded to include assisting local and regional preservation projects, organizing regional workshops, presenting our findings to local commissions and the State Office of Historic Preservation, cultivating extensive press coverage and developing a website. The project was sponsored by the California Japanese American Community Leadership Council and nreceived three funding rounds from the California State Library’s highly competitive grant program California Civil Liberties Public Education Project.
A walking tour of Lodi's Japantown helped city leaders understand the powerful history of an area slated for redevelopment. Photo: Donna Graves
Jill Shiraki and Donna Graves with Mas Hashimoto at his childhood home in Watsonville. During the 1920-30s, the Hashimotos ran a small udon shop and sake brewery from the first floor of their house, and rented the second story to Dr. Frank Ito, a dentist. Photo: Alice Duncan-Graves
The project documented hundreds of places from modest vernacular buildings to grand edifices such as the Fresno Buddhist Church. Photo: Japanese American National Museum
The connection of community stories to historic places was foregrounded by the project, such as this Japanese American basketball team associated with a Berkeley gymnasium. Photo: Berkeley Historical Society
Graves co-directed (with Michelle Magalong) a project inviting people to share information about Asian Pacific Islander American cultural and historic sites through a website and smart phone app. People can “pin” photos, videos, audio and text about places that matter to diverse API communities. Community workshops, lectures, Google hangout sessions and webinars have brought the project to a broad audience.
East at Main Street is especially timely because, as part of their systematic effort to more fully encompass the story of “all Americans,” the National Park Service is developing a national initiative about Asian Pacific Islander history. East at Main Street promises to complement their academic study with a wealth of community-based knowledge. Support came through grants from the National Center for Preservation Training and Technology and from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The project sponsor, Asian Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation (APIAHiP), is a national, grassroots network of preservationists, historians, planners, and advocates focused on historic and cultural preservation in Asian & Pacific Islander American communities. Graves served as program co-chair for APIAHiP's national conferences in 2010 (San Francisco), 2012 (Los Angeles) and 2014 (Washington DC).
Seattle Youth Heritage Workshop with Wing Luke Museum and Washington Trust for Historic Preservation, Photo: Donna Graves
Seattle Youth Heritage Workshop with Wing Luke Museum and Washington Trust for Historic Preservation, Photo: Donna Graves
Donna Graves speaking at Asian American Community Development conference, City University of New York
In addition to the Rosie the Riveter Memorial, Graves has been involved on other monumental projects and in speaking and writing about how we memorialize the past.
As Executive Director of The Power of Place, she worked on the Biddy Mason project, which commemorated the life of an African American women who was a major figure in 19th century Los Angeles. The project, completed in 1989, included artworks by Betye Saar and Sheila de Bretteville at the former site of Mason’s homestead, and an artists’s book by Susan King.
She organized and managed a design competition for a monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on San Francisco’s waterfront (2008). The selected design was by artist Ann Chamberlain and landscape architect Walter Hood.
Biddy Mason’s descendants at artwork dedication.
Biddy Mason: Time and Place by Sheila de Bretteville. De Bretteville’s design presents Mason’s life story along a timeline of Los Angeles’ history.
The Memorial honors the 2,800 members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, U.S. volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) who joined forces with citizens of Spain and other international volunteer units in their fight against fascism.
The Lincoln Brigade Monument is located across San Francisco’s Embarcadero from the iconic Ferry Building.
Eleven Lincoln Brigade volunteers attended to memorial dedication in 2008.
Graves has conducted research for historic resource studies, landmark nominations, historic site surveys, and development of National Register Multiple Property Documents for numerous clients. She is a key member of a team (with Page & Turnbull) selected by the California Office of Historic Preservation to develop a statewide National Register Multiple Property Nomination for Asian American/Pacific Islander history in California.
She developed historic context statements for San Francisco's Japantown for the City's San Francisco's first plan generated by a neighborhood's cultural history and another for downtown Richmond to expand the City's understanding of how the city changed during and after WWII. The City of Riverside engaged her to develop a National Register Multiple Property submission focussed on Japanese American Heritage and the Quest for Civil Rights in Riverside, 1890s-1970s.
The Women's Building was erected as a German American social hall in 1910. In 1978 a group of radical women, the San Francisco Women's Centers, bought the property, which describes itself as “the only woman-owned, woman-operated facility of its kind in the United States.” A collective of women artists painted the ambitious mural Maestrapeace on the building's exterior in 1994. Photo: Paul Krueger Flickr
San Francisco's Japanese YWCA at 1830 Sutter Street was designed by famed architect Julia Morgan and completed in 1932. Barred from joining the all-White YWCA, Japanese immigrant women founded the chapter in 1912 and later raised funds for this building. Photo: Stacy Farr
The Harada family fought a heroic legal struggle to remain in the home they purchased at 3356 Lemon Street in Riverside, challenging California's discriminatory "Alien Land Law," which prohibited Asian immigrants from owning property. Their successful battle to gain these civil rights was the subject of great attention at the time and the house became a National Historic Landmark in 1990. Photo: City of Riverside
Inspired by the Harada House's significance, the City of Riverside engaged Graves and Professor Catherine Gudis from UC Riverside to conduct additional research, including a city-wide survey, a historic context report, and community walking tours, on the broader history of Japanese Americans in Riverside. Photo: Donna Graves
Stockton’s Sikh Gurdwara, the first Sikh temple in the U.S., has been a center for the Sikh and Punjabi diaspora since 1915. The temple is an important resource for the California AAPI study, which encompasses historic sites associated with Native Hawaiian, Chamorro and Samoan communities as well as those built by immigrants from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and South Asia.
Photo: Gurdwaar.com
The murals at Coit Tower were part of citywide study of New Deal era art and architecture Graves conducted with architectural historian, Christopher Verplanck.
Graves led interdisciplinary teams to create two sets of permanent interpretive markers in Richmond for the City and the National Park Service. Eight sculptural markers trace World War II history along the waterfront path of the San Francisco Bay Trail—once the site of Richmond’s Kaiser shipyards.
Based on the success of the Bay Trail markers project, the Richmond Redevelopment Agency asked her to reassemble the creative team to develop another project along twenty blocks of Macdonald Avenue, the city’s historic “Main Street.” Before beginning design, she developed a six-month series of community engagement programs called “Memories of Macdonald” to build support among downtown residents and businesses, and to gather material for our story-telling markers. “Memories of Macdonald” events enlisted diverse partners to conduct walking tours, organize photo- and story-gathering programs, create a youth theater project, and host an inter-generational “dance swap” in an historic dance hall.
Photo: Ellen Gailing
Photo: Ellen Gailing
Betty Soskin and Antonio Medrano in front of marker "Divided We Live." Soskin worked in the office of the segregated shipyard union during WWII. Medrano points to a photo of himself as a small child in front of the defense housing he shared with his extended family. Photo: Ellen Gailing
Photo: Ellen Gailing
A "Dance Swap" organized with choreographer Joanna Haigood brought generations of social dance to the old Winters Building Hall. Photo: Ellen Gailing
Macdonald Avenue Walking Tour. Photo: Ellen Gailing
Photo: Ellen Gailing
Graves served as historian and interpretive specialist on a team led by Placeworks to plan for a new 2,537-acre park in the East Bay at the former Concord Naval Weapons Station. Concord Hills Regional Park will be managed by East Bay Regional Park District with the City of Concord and the National Park Service to provide a full range of trail opportunities, wildlife preservation, and environmental and historic interpretation. The team developed a land use plan for the park, which will include a joint visitor center highlighting the history of the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial. The Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial was established by President Obama in 2010 to commemorate the national significance of the largest homefront disaster of World War II and the subsequent events that led to the desegregation of the military. Graves continues to serve in a consulting role to East Bay Regional Parks on this project.
Photo: Donna Graves
Photo: Donna Graves
Photo: Donna Graves
Photo: Donna Graves
Photo: Donna Graves
Photo: Donna Graves
Placeworks' illustration of one of the land use alternatives for Concord Hills Regional Park.
Placeworks' illustration of potential reuse of bunker.
