Historians have more than one audience. Some readers want quick timelines or dates; others want footnotes and archival debates. But there is a middle ground for readers who wrestle with ideas, yet are not professional historians. Writing for them is both a challenge and an opportunity. This is not mere transmission of facts. It is an invitation. Think alongside me to follow the logic of evidence, to see how past and present inform one another, and to weigh the stakes of competing plans for the future.
Interpretive practice offers guidance here. Heritage interpreters remind us that
interpretation is a communication process that forges emotional and intellectual connections
between the interests of the audience and the inherent meanings in the resource.1
Imagine yourself on April 18, 1933, at Jerusalem’s newly opened YMCA building. Which parts of the past would come to mind, or become unremembered? What kind of future would you envision?
Imagine yourself on April 18, 1933, at Jerusalem’s newly opened YMCA building. Which parts of the past would come to mind, or become unremembered? What kind of future would you envision? Your answer would depend largely on who you were, a Jew from the ancient remnant community, an Arab Muslim, a British official, a Christian missionary. In the essays ahead, I will try to do some perspective taking on how different people standing at that same building, on that same day, would have answered these questions completely differently. And strikingly, an official German Nazi group seemed to completely have stayed away, although they were reconnoitering around the area. Their conflicting responses reveal why Jerusalem’s competing meanings of what the city represented to each group, could not be reconciled in that moment.
This is why I have chosen a hub-and-spoke method for my project on the 1933 dedication of the Jerusalem YMCA. Each chapter follows one group, be they imperial administrators, religious leaders, or Zionist nationalists as they look backward to justify their presence, act at the dedication, and imagine what should be according to their POV. The dedication itself becomes the hub where these visions collide.
In several fields, hub-and-spoke designs organize complex systems by concentrating core resources in a central hub and dispersing supporting units as spokes. In healthcare, the model improves care delivery where a central facility provides full services and peripheral clinics refer complex cases inward, as in India where medical colleges act as hubs. Telestroke networks use spoke hospitals to triage patients and transfer them to hub centers for treatment. In data analytics, a centralized data hub supports multiple analyst teams, ensuring consistency while allowing project-specific work. These examples show how the model links a central point to multiple lines of action which is precisely the structure I use to study the YMCA dedication. My contribution is to adapt this framework to historical and pilgrimage studies by treating a single geotemporal moment, the 1933 YMCA dedication, as the hub that reveals how diverse groups related past, present, and future.2
Therefore, my historical motivation remains primary. This project examines the 18 April 1933 dedication of the Jerusalem YMCA as a moment in which multiple imperial, religious, and nationalist visions converged. Methodologically, I adopt a hub-and-spoke structure as the dedication is the hub; each chapter is a spoke that radiates outward to examine a particular group’s relationship to past, present, and future.
Each spoke answers three questions in relation to the hub:
–> Looking Backward (Memory-Making): What past does this actor invoke to justify its presence or claim?
— > At the Hub (Present-Day Rationale): How does the actor choose to act at the dedication itself? What artifacts, speeches, or spatial practices mark that moment?
–> Looking Forward (Preferred Futures): What future does the actor attempt to project from this moment, and how does it try to render that future inevitable or natural?
This threefold pattern keeps chronological detail in service of comparative analysis because each spoke is a focused case study, and the hub forces them into conversation.
Two Methodological Benefits
This structure avoids two common methodological errors. First, it prevents chapters from becoming isolated narratives by showing how each group’s actions and visions intersect and clash at the hub. Second, it resists false equivalence; each chapter preserves analytical independence, but the hub functions as a shared reference point for comparison, revealing why these visions ultimately proved incompatible. In short the method shows both difference and relation.
Why This Matters
Applied to the 1933 YMCA dedication, the hub-and-spoke approach makes temporal orientation itself a piece of evidence. This means how actors invoke histories, perform in the present, and imagine futures is appreciative for the twenty-first historiographical turn toward the sacred. For a history reader, this method offers a concrete analytic entry of one richly documented moment from which to appreciate deeper patterns of meaning-making and contestation across groups that otherwise might remain described in abstract terms.3
- 1. Douglas M. Knudson, Ted T. Cable, and Larry Beck, Interpretation of Cultural and Natural Resources, 2nd ed. (State College, PA: Venture Publishing, 2003), ch. 1. ↩︎
- 2. Moonis Mirza et al., “Indian Model of Integrated Healthcare (IMIH): A Conceptual Framework for a Coordinated Referral System in Resource-constrained Settings,” BMC Health Services Research 24, no. 1 (January 9, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-023-10454-2; Gilbert Lazarus et al., “Telestroke Strategies to Enhance Acute Stroke Management in Rural Settings: A Systematic Review and Meta‐analysis,” Brain and Behavior 10, no. 10 (August 18, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.1787; Scott Moore, “Why The Data Hub Is the Future of Data Management – Semarchy,” Semarchy (blog), July 22, 2025, https://semarchy.com/blog/why-the-data-hub-is-the-future-of-data-management/. ↩︎
- 3. YMCA of the USA, International Division, “Records of YMCA International Work in Palestine and Israel: YMCA Historical Library and Kautz Family YMCA Records,” 2003, accessed September 9, 2025, https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/7/resources/929. ↩︎