John Reps: The Missing Monograms Mystery: An Urban Planning Detective Story

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of The Making of Urban America, Professor Emeritus John Reps presents this lecture that takes us back more than 300 years to examine how an important colonial American town was planned and how and why its unusual design was changed. Thousands of visitors come each week to admire its orderly design and leave unaware that what they saw was not what its founder intended. There is more than one mystery here, and to solve them the historian becomes a detective: searching for evidence, using imagination, exploring possibilities, and arriving at conclusions. The audience will serve as the jury and decide if the case has been solved.