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Realtors Interpret History: The Intellectual Origins of Early National Real Estate Organizing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2024

Paige Glotzer*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

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.

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Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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