Avenue of American History
Significance of the Avenue of American History
- The Avenue of American History is a compelling educational tool in which the uniform time periods and the ongoing dialogue between past, present, and future will draw in youngsters and enable them to see their place and their potential in the flow of events we call history.
- The Avenue will also be a place of entertainment and an emotionally stirring place to visit.
- The Avenue of American History can be viewed as a tourist attraction that will significantly boost the City’s and the region’s reputation nationally and internationally. This fits in well with Philadelphia's new designation as America's first and only World Heritage City.
- The project will illuminate the very process of recording history. History in the eyes of many is no longer viewed as a body of immutable facts, free of bias, but as an on-going activity that is subject to both deliberate and inadvertent distortions because it is, in the end, a self-referential endeavor.
- History, as a narrative created after the fact, rather than the body-of-source events themselves, is in its simplest terms both a story about the past and the act of telling the story. It is therefore always subject to revision. The Avenue will help reveal history as a constantly changing reflection of ourselves mirrored in the reflective surface of our own humanity.
- The Avenue of American History will encourage the self-evaluation of a people. In turn, each person may be inclined to measure his or her role in society. Our differences in this melting pot of immigrants will be poignantly illustrated; so too will the accommodations that must be worked out between those of differing views. Hopefully a greater sense of tolerance for the dissimilar views and lifestyles of others will be fostered as a result of seeing that some of the battles have been won in the on-going effort to allow our differences to flow as adjacent currents in a broad and common mainstream.
- Youngsters "walking" with their parents on the Avenue of American History may be inclined to ask: “What ideas and things will we put in our Hall of History? What will we leave behind?”