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- Title
Realtors Interpret History: The Intellectual Origins of Early National Real Estate Organizing.
- Authors
Glotzer, Paige
- Abstract
In 1891, when U.S. realtors attempted to establish their first national professional organization, the National Real Estate Association (NREA), they turned to history to provide a shared intellectual foundation to justify collective organization. Though the NREA was only in operation for a short period, the ways its members invoked history illuminate how key assumptions about race, property, and citizenship became central to a nascent national real estate industry, predating the more well-known real estate professionalization projects of the twentieth century. History united members from different regions with little in common who were skeptical of the need to form a national institution. They used history in three ways to sustain the organization: repeating narratives, theorizing historical change, and constructing historical subjects. They infused each of these with an imperial worldview fashioned from competing lines of thought in circulation at the time. Among these were sectional reconciliation, manifest destiny, and narratives of civilizational progress. Through their actions, they embedded white supremacist Gilded Age and Progressive Era formulations of history into real estate via the new institution.
- Subjects
REAL property; REAL estate agents; REAL estate business; INTELLECTUAL history
- Publication
Journal of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era, 2024, Vol 23, Issue 2, p190
- ISSN
1537-7814
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/S1537781423000506