front cover of Alabama's Civil Rights Trail
Alabama's Civil Rights Trail
An Illustrated Guide to the Cradle of Freedom
Frye Gaillard
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Alabama’s great civil rights events in a compact and accessible narrative, paired with a practical guide to Alabama’s preserved civil rights sites and monuments
 
No other state has embraced and preserved its civil rights history more thoroughly than Alabama. Nor is there a place where that history is richer. Alabama’s Civil Rights Trail tells of Alabama’s great civil rights events, as well as its lesser-known moments, in a compact and accessible narrative, paired with a practical guide to Alabama’s preserved civil rights sites and monuments.
 
In this history of Alabama’s civil rights movement, Cradle of Freedom (University of Alabama Press, 2004), Frye Gaillard contends that Alabama played the lead role in a historic movement that made all citizens of the nation, black and white, more free. This book, geared toward the casual traveler and the serious student alike, showcases in a vividly illustrated and compelling manner, valuable and rich details. It provides a user-friendly, graphic tool for the growing number of travelers, students, and civil rights pilgrims who visit the state annually.
 
The story of the civil rights movement in Alabama is told city by city, region by region, and town by town, with entries on Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, Tuscaloosa, Tuskegee, and Mobile, as well as chapters on the Black Belt and the Alabama hill country. Smaller but important locales such as Greensboro, Monroeville, and Scottsboro are included, as are more obscure sites like Hale County’s Safe House Black History Museum and the birthplace of the Black Panther Party in Lowndes County
[more]

front cover of All the King’s Horses
All the King’s Horses
Essays on the Impact of Looting and the Illicit Antiquities Trade on Our Knowledge of the Past
Paula K. Lazrus
University Press of Colorado, 2012
This volume from the SAA Press examines the impact of looting and the use of artifacts of unknown provenance in the humanities and social sciences, ranging from the impact of amnesty laws for reporting stolen cultural property to the use of Google Earth to assess the scale of illicit excavations, and from the impact of poorly sourced artifacts on early Mycenaean and Minoan studies to the structure of the growing commercial trade in ancient coins.
[more]

front cover of Along the Texas Forts Trail
Along the Texas Forts Trail
B. W. Aston
University of North Texas Press, 1997

front cover of The Antiquities Act
The Antiquities Act
A Century of American Archaeology, Historic Preservation, and Nature Conservation
Edited by David Harmon, Frances P. McManamon, and Dwight T. Pitcaithley
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Winner of the State of New Mexico’s Heritage Preservation Award in the category of Heritage Publication

Enacted in 1906, the Antiquities Act is one of the most important pieces of conservation legislation in American history and has had a far-reaching influence on the preservation of our nation’s cultural and natural heritage. Thanks to the foresight of thirteen presidents, parks as diverse as Acadia, Grand Canyon, and Olympic National Park, along with historic and archaeological sites such as Thomas Edison’s Laboratory and the Gila Cliff Dwellings, have been preserved for posterity.

A century after its passage, this book presents a definitive assessment of the Antiquities Act and its legacy, addressing the importance and breadth of the act—as well as the controversy it has engendered. Authored by professionals intimately involved with safeguarding the nation’s archaeological, historic, and natural heritage, it describes the applications of the act and assesses its place in our country’s future. With a scope as far-reaching as the resources the act embraces, this book offers an unparalleled opportunity for today’s stewards to reflect on the act’s historic accomplishments, to remind fellow professionals and the general public of its continuing importance, and to look ahead to its continuing implementation in the twenty-first century.

The Antiquities Act invites all who love America’s natural and cultural treasures not only to learn about the act’s rich legacy but also to envision its next hundred years.
[more]

front cover of The Archaeological Guide to Iowa
The Archaeological Guide to Iowa
William E. Whittaker, Lynn M. Alex, Mary De La Garza
University of Iowa Press, 2015
Iowa has the reputation of being one big corn field, so you may be surprised to learn it boasts a rich crop of recorded archaeological sites as well—approximately 27,000 at last count. Some are spectacular, such as the one hundred mounds at Sny Magill in Effigy Mounds National Monument, while others consist of old abandoned farmsteads or small scatters of prehistoric flakes and heated rocks. Untold numbers are completely gone or badly disturbed—destroyed by plowing, erosion, or development.

Fortunately, there are many sites open to the public where the remnants of the past are visible, either in their original location or in nearby museum exhibits. Few things are more inspiring than walking among the Malchow Mounds, packed so tightly it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Strolling around downtown Des Moines is a lot more interesting when you are aware of the mounds, Indian villages, and the fort that once stood there. And, although you can’t visit the Wanampito site, you can see the splendid seventeenth-century artifacts excavated from it at Heery Woods State Park.

For people who want to experience Iowa’s archaeological heritage first hand, this one-of-a-kind guidebook shows the way to sixty-eight important sites. Many are open to visitors or can be seen from a public location; others, on private land or no longer visible on the landscape, live on through artifact displays. The guide also includes a few important sites that are not open to visitors because these places have unique stories to tell. Sites of every type, from every time period, and in every corner of the state are featured. Whether you have a few hours to indulge your curiosity or are planning a road trip across the state, this guide will take you to places where Iowa’s deep history comes to life.
[more]

front cover of Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains
Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains
Laura L. Scheiber
University Press of Colorado, 2008
Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains combines history, anthropology, archaeology, and geography to take a closer look at the relationships between land and people in this unique North American region.

Focusing on long-term change, this book considers ethnographic literature, archaeological evidence, and environmental data spanning thousands of years of human presence to understand human perception and construction of landscape. The contributors offer cohesive and synthetic studies emphasizing hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers.

Using landscape as both reality and metaphor, Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains explores the different and changing ways that people interacted with place in this transitional zone between the Rocky Mountains and the eastern prairies.

The contemporary archaeologists working in this small area have chosen diverse approaches to understand the past and its relationship to the present. Through these ten case studies, this variety is highlighted but leads to a common theme - that the High Plains contains important locales to which people, over generations or millennia, return. Providing both data and theory on a region that has not previously received much attention from archaeologists, especially compared with other regions in North America, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature. Contributors:
o Paul Burnett
o Oskar Burger
o Minette C. Church
o Philip Duke
o Kevin Gilmore
o Eileen Johnson
o Mark D. Mitchell
o Michael R. Peterson
o Lawrence Todd

[more]

front cover of Archaeologies of African American Life in the Upper Mid-Atlantic
Archaeologies of African American Life in the Upper Mid-Atlantic
Edited by Michael J. Gall and Richard F. Veit
University of Alabama Press, 2017
A 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
 
New scholarship provides insights into the archaeology and cultural history of African American life from a collection of sites in the Mid-Atlantic
 
This groundbreaking volume explores the archaeology of African American life and cultures in the Upper Mid-Atlantic region, using sites dating from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Sites in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York are all examined, highlighting the potential for historical archaeology to illuminate the often overlooked contributions and experiences of the region’s free and enslaved African American settlers.
 
Archaeologies of African American Life in the Upper Mid-Atlantic brings together cutting-edge scholarship from both emerging and established scholars. Analyzing the research through sophisticated theoretical lenses and employing up-to-date methodologies, the essays reveal the diverse ways in which African Americans reacted to and resisted the challenges posed by life in a borderland between the North and South through the transition from slavery to freedom. In addition to extensive archival research, contributors synthesize the material finds of archaeological work in slave quarter sites, tenant farms, communities, and graveyards.
 
Editors Michael J. Gall and Richard F. Veit have gathered new and nuanced perspectives on the important role free and enslaved African Americans played in the region’s cultural history. This collection provides scholars of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions, African American studies, material culture studies, religious studies, slavery, the African diaspora, and historical archaeologists with a well-balanced array of rural archaeological sites that represent cultural traditions and developments among African Americans in the region. Collectively, these sites illustrate African Americans’ formation of fluid cultural and racial identities, communities, religious traditions, and modes of navigating complex cultural landscapes in the region under harsh and disenfranchising circumstances.
 
[more]

front cover of Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution
Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution
A Tale of Two Taverns and the Growth of Philadelphia
Rebecca Yamin
Temple University Press, 2019

When the Museum of the American Revolution acquired the land at Third and Chestnut streets in Olde City, Philadelphia, it came with the condition that an archaeological investigation be conducted. The excavation that began in the summer of 2014 yielded treasures in the trash: unearthed privy pits provided remarkable finds from a mid-eighteenth-century tavern to relics from a button factory dating to the early twentieth century. These artifacts are described and analyzed by urban archaeologist Rebecca Yamin in Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution.

Yamin, lead archaeologist on the dig, catalogues items—including earthenware plates and jugs, wig curlers, clay pipes, and liquor bottles—to tell the stories of their owners and their roles in Philadelphia history. As she uncovers the history of the people as well as their houses, taverns, and buildings that were once on the site, she explains  that by looking at these remains, we see the story of the growth of Philadelphia from its colonial beginnings to the Second World War.

Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution is a perfect keepsake for armchair archaeologists, introductory students, and history buffs.

[more]

front cover of Archaeology, Narrative, and the Politics of the Past
Archaeology, Narrative, and the Politics of the Past
The View from Southern Maryland
Julia A. King
University of Tennessee Press, 2012

In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a variety of sources and disciplinary approaches—archaeological, historical, architectural, literary, and art-historical—to show how places take on, convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in which various groups, from patriots and politicians of the antebellum era to present-day archaeologists and preservationists, have transformed key landscapes into historical, indeed sacred, spaces.
    The sites King examines include the region’s vanishing tobacco farms; St. Mary’s City, established as Maryland’s first capital by English settlers in the seventeenth century; and Point Lookout, the location of a prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. As the author explores the historical narratives associated with such places, she uncovers some surprisingly durable myths as well as competing ones. St. Mary’s City, for example, early on became the center of Maryland’s “founding narrative” of religious tolerance, a view commemorated in nineteenth-century celebrations and reflected even today in local museum exhibits and preserved buildings. And at Point Lookout, one private group has established a Confederate Memorial Park dedicated to those who died at the prison, thus nurturing the Lost Cause ideology that arose in the South in the late 1800s, while nearby the custodians of a 1,000-acre state park avoid controversy by largely ignoring the area’s Civil War history, preferring instead to concentrate on recreation and tourism, an unusually popular element of which has become the recounting of ghost stories.
    As King shows, the narratives that now constitute the public memory in southern Maryland tend to overlook the region’s more vexing legacies, particularly those involving slavery and race. Noting how even her own discipline of historical archaeology has been complicit in perpetuating old narratives, King calls for research—particularly archaeological research—that produces new stories and “counter-narratives” that challenge old perceptions and interpretations and thus convey a more nuanced grasp of a complicated past.

Julia A. King is an associate professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where she coordinates the Museum Studies Program and directs the SlackWater Center, a consortium devoted to exploring, documenting, and interpreting the changing landscapes of Chesapeake communities. She is also coeditor, with Dennis B. Blanton, of Indian and European Contact in Context: The Mid-Atlantic Region.

[more]

front cover of Arkansas Women and the Right to Vote
Arkansas Women and the Right to Vote
The Little Rock Campaigns: 1868-1920
Bernadette Cahill
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2015
Women from all over Arkansas—left out of the civil rights granted by the post–Civil War Reconstruction Amendments—took part in a long struggle to gain the primary civil right of American citizens: voting. The state’s capital city of Little Rock served as the focal point not only for suffrage work in Arkansas, but also for the state’s contribution to the nationwide nonviolent campaign for women’s suffrage that reached its climax between 1913 and 1920. Based on original research, Cahill’s book relates the history of some of those who contributed to this victorious struggle, reveals long-forgotten photographs, includes a map of the locations of meetings and rallies, and provides a list of Arkansas suffragists who helped ensure that discrimination could no longer exclude women from participation in the political life of the state and nation.
[more]

front cover of The Assassination of Paris
The Assassination of Paris
Louis Chevalier
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Published to controversial acclaim in 1977, The Assassination of Paris describes the transformation of the Paris of Raymond Queneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson; of quartiers of carpenters and Communists and country folk from the Auvergne; of dance halls and corner cafes. Much of Louis Chevalier's Paris faced the wrecking ball in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, as Georges Pompidou, Andre Malraux and their cadres of young technocratic elites sought to proclaim the glory of the new France by reinventing the capital in brutal visions of glass and steel. Chevalier sought to tell the world what was at stake, and who the villains were.

He describes an almost continual parade of garish and grandiose plans: some, like the destruction of the glorious marketplace of les Halles for him the heart of the city, were realized; others, like the superhighway along the left bank of the Seine, were bitterly and successfully resisted.

Almost twenty years later, we find it difficult to remember the city as it was. And while Paris looks to many much the way it always has, behind the carefully sandblasted stone and restored shop fronts is a city radically transformed—emptied of centuries of popular life; of entire neighborhoods and the communities they housed engineered out to desolate suburban slums. The battle over the soul and spirit of the city continues.

This book is not entirely about the loss of physical places. Or a romance about a world that never really was. It is a cautionary tale filled with lessons for all who struggle to protect the human scale, the diversity, and the welcoming public life that are the threatened gifts of all great cities.
[more]

logo for University of Manitoba Press
Authorized Heritage
Place, Memory, and Historic Sites in Prairie Canada
Robert Coutts
University of Manitoba Press, 2021

front cover of The Battle over Peleliu
The Battle over Peleliu
Islander, Japanese, and American Memories of War
Stephen C. Murray
University of Alabama Press, 2016
An engrossing account of the military, cultural, and commercial impact of Japan and the USA on the island nation of Palau

The expansionist Japanese empire annexed the inhabited archipelago of Palau in 1914. The airbase built on Peleliu Island became a target for attack by the United States in World War II. The Battle over Peleliu:  Islander, Japanese, and American Memories of War offers an ethnographic study of how Palau and Peleliu were transformed by warring great powers and further explores how their conflict is remembered differently by the three peoples who shared that experience.
 
Author Stephen C. Murray uses oral histories from Peleliu’s elders to reconstruct the island’s prewar way of life, offering a fascinating explanation of the role of land and place in island culture. To Palauans, history is conceived geographically, not chronologically. Land and landmarks are both the substance of history and the mnemonic triggers that recall the past. Murray then offers a detailed account of the 1944 US invasion against entrenched Japanese forces on Peleliu, a seventy-four-day campaign that razed villages, farms, ancestral cemeteries, beaches, and forests, and with them, many of the key nodes of memory and identity.
 
Murray also explores how Islanders’ memories of the battle as shattering their way of life differ radically from the ways Japanese and Americans remember the engagement in their histories, memoirs, fiction, monuments, and tours of Peleliu. Determination to retrieve the remains of 11,000 Japanese soldiers from the caves of Peleliu has driven high-profile civic groups from across the Japanese political spectrum to the island. Contemporary Japan continues to debate pacifist, right-wing apologist, and other interpretations of its aggression in Asia and the Pacific. These disputes are exported to Peleliu, and subtly frame how Japanese commemoration portrays the battle in stone and ritual. Americans, victors in the battle, return to the archipelago in far fewer numbers. For them, the conflict remains controversial but is most often submerged into the narrative of “the good war.”
 
The Battle over Peleliu is a study of public memory, and the ways three peoples swept up in conflict struggle to create a common understanding of the tragedy they share.
[more]

front cover of Becoming Villagers
Becoming Villagers
Comparing Early Village Societies
Edited by Matthew S. Bandy and Jake R. Fox
University of Arizona Press, 2010
The shift from mobile hunting and gathering to more sedentary, usually agricultural, lifeways was one of the most significant milestones in the prehistory of humanity. This transformation was spurred by an alignment of social and ecological forces, pressures, and adaptations, and it took place in broadly comparable ways in many prehistoric settings.

Based on a Society for American Archaeology symposium and subsequent Amerind Advanced Seminar in 2006, Becoming Villagers examines this transformation at various places and times across the globe by focusing not on the origins of agriculture and village life but rather on their consequences. The goal of the volume is to identify regularities in the ways that societies developed in the centuries and millennia following a transition to village life. Using cases that range from China to Bolivia and from the Near East to the American Southwest, leading archaeologists situate their specific areas of specialization in a broad comparative context.

They consider the forces acting to divide and fragment early villages and the social technologies and practices by which those obstacles were, in some cases, overcome. Finally, the volume examines the long-term historical trajectories of these early village societies.

This transformative collection makes a powerful case for a renewed and invigorated archaeological focus on large-scale comparative studies. It will be an essential read for anyone interested not only in early village societies but also in the ways in which archaeology relates to anthropology, other social sciences, and history.

CONTENTS:
  1. “Becoming Villagers: The Evolution of Early Village Societies,” Matthew S. Bandy and Jake R. Fox
  2. “Population Growth, Village Fissioning, and Alternative Early Village Trajectories,” Matthew S. Bandy
  3. “A Scale Model of Seven Hundred Years of Farming Settlements in Southwestern Colorado,” Timothy A. Kohler and Mark D. Varien
  4. “‘Great Expectations,’ or the Inevitable Collapse of the Early Neolithic in the Near East,” Nigel Goring-Morris and Anna Belfer-Cohen
  5. “‘Ritualization’ in Early Village Society: The Case of the Lake Titicaca Basin Formative,” Amanda B. Cohen
  6. “The Sacred and the Secular Revisited: The Essential Tensions of Early Village Society in the Southeastern United States,” Thomas Pluckhahn
  7. “Substantial Structures, Few People, and the Question of Early Villages in the Mimbres Region of the North American Southwest,” Patricia A. Gilman
  8. “Sea Changes in Stable Communities: What Do Small Changes in Practices at Catalhoyuk and Chiripa Imply about Community Making?” Christine A. Hastorf
  9. “The Emergence of Early Villages in the American Southwest: Cultural Issues and Historical Perspectives,” Richard H. Wilshusen and James M. Potter
  10. “A Persistent Early Village Settlement System on the Bolivian Southern Altiplano,” Jake R. Fox
  11. “First Towns in the Americas: Searching for Agriculture, Population Growth, and Other Enabling Conditions,” John E. Clark, Jon L. Gibson, and James Zeidler
  12. “The Evolution of Early Yangshao Period Village Organization in the Middle Reaches of Northern China's Yellow River Valley,” Christian E. Peterson and Gideon Shelach
[more]

front cover of Behind the Big House
Behind the Big House
Reconciling Slavery, Race, and Heritage in the U.S. South
Jodi Skipper
University of Iowa Press, 2022
2022 Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group Nelson Graburn Prize, winner

When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people. Behind the Big House gives readers a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper’s eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture.

In laying out her experiences through an autoethnographic approach, Skipper seeks to help other activist scholars of color negotiate the nuances of place, the academic public sphere, and its ambiguous systems of reward, recognition, and evaluation.
 
[more]

front cover of Bending the Future
Bending the Future
Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States
Edited by Max Page and Marla R. Miller
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
The year 2016 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act, the cornerstone of historic preservation policy and practice in the United States. The act established the National Register of Historic Places, a national system of state preservation offices and local commissions, set up federal partnerships between states and tribes, and led to the formation of the standards for preservation and rehabilitation of historic structures. This book marks its fiftieth anniversary by collecting fifty new and provocative essays that chart the future of preservation.

The commentators include leading preservation professionals, historians, writers, activists, journalists, architects, and urbanists. The essays offer a distinct vision for the future and address related questions, including, Who is a preservationist? What should be preserved? Why? How? What stories do we tell in preservation? How does preservation contribute to the financial, environmental, social, and cultural well-being of communities? And if the "arc of the moral universe . . . bends towards justice," how can preservation be a tool for achieving a more just society and world?
[more]

front cover of Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape
Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape
Deep Roots, Continuing Legacy
Amy Jane Cohen
Temple University Press, 2024
Black Philadelphians have shaped Philadelphia history since colonial times. In Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape, Amy Cohen recounts notable aspects of the Black experience in Philadelphia from the late 1600s to the 1960s and how this history is marked in the contemporary city. She charts Charles Blockson’s efforts to commemorate the Pennsylvania slave trade with a historical marker and highlights Richard Allen, who founded Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church.

Cohen also describes the path to erecting a statue of civil rights activist Octavius Catto at Philadelphia’s City Hall and profiles international celebrities Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson who are honored in the city. At the end of each chapter, she includes suggestions to continue readers’ exploration of this important cultural heritage.

Showing how increased attention to the role of African Americans in local and national history has resulted in numerous, sometimes controversial, alterations to the landscape, Cohen guides readers to Black history’s significance and its connections with today’s spotlight on racial justice.
[more]

front cover of Black Women Legacies
Black Women Legacies
Public History Sites Seen and Unseen
Alexandria Russell
University of Illinois Press, 2024
From Black clubwomen to members of preservation organizations, African American women have made commemoration a central part of Black life and culture. Alexandria Russell illuminates the process of memorialization while placing African American women at the center of memorials they brought into being and others constructed in their honor. Their often undocumented and unheralded work reveals the importance of the memorializers and public memory crafters in establishing a culture of recognition. Forced to strategize with limited resources, the women operated with a resourcefulness and savvy that had to meet challenges raised by racism, gender and class discrimination, and specific regional difficulties. Yet their efforts from the 1890s to the 2020s shaped and honed practices that became indispensable to the everyday life and culture of Black Americans.

Intersectional and original, Black Women Legacies explores the memorialization of African American women and its distinctive impact on physical and cultural landscapes throughout the United States.

[more]

front cover of Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Birth, Commemoration, and American Public Memory
Seth C. Bruggeman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Scores of birthplace monuments and historic childhood homes dot the American landscape. These special places, many dating to the early years of the last century, have enshrined nativity alongside patriotism and valor among the key pillars of the nation's popular historical imagination. The essays in this volume suggest that the way Americans have celebrated famous births reflects evolving expectations of citizenship as well as a willingness to edit the past when those hopes go unfulfilled. The contributors also demonstrate that the reinvention of origin myths at birthplace monuments still factors in American political culture and the search for meaning in an ever-shifting global order.

Beyond asking why it is that Americans care about birthplaces and how they choose which ones to commemorate, Born in the U.S.A. offers insights from historians, curators, interpretive specialists, and others whose experience speaks directly to the challenges of managing historical sites. Each essay points to new ways of telling old stories at these mainstays of American memory. The case of the modern house museum receives special attention in a provocative concluding essay by Patricia West.

In addition to West and the editor, contributors include Christine Arato, Dan Currie, Keith A. Erekson, David Glassberg, Anna Thompson Hajdik, Zachary J. Lechner, Paul Lewis, Hilary Iris Lowe, Cynthia Miller, Laura Lawfer Orr, Robert Paynter, Angela Phelps, and Paul Reber.
[more]

front cover of The Chora of Metaponto 2
The Chora of Metaponto 2
Archaeozoology at Pantanello and Five Other Sites
Studies by Sándor Bökönyi and Erika Gál
University of Texas Press, 2010

From 1974 to the present, the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin has carried out archaeological excavations in the ancient territory (chora) of Metaponto, now located in the modern province of Basilicata on the southern coast of Italy. This wide-ranging investigation, which covers a number of sites and a time period ranging from prehistory to the Roman Empire, has unearthed a wealth of new information about the ancient rural economy in southern Italy. These discoveries will be published in a multi-volume series titled The Chora of Metaponto. This volume on archaeozoology—the study of animal remains from archaeological sites—is the second in the series, following The Chora of Metaponto: The Necropoleis (1998).

Archaeozoology at Pantanello and Five Other Sites describes the animal remains found throughout Metaponto and discusses what they reveal about ancient practices of hunting and herding, domestication and importation of new breeds, people's attitudes toward animals, and what animal remains indicate about past environments. A chapter devoted to bird bones, which are a relatively rare find because of their fragility, provides high quality information on the environment and methods of fowling, as well as on the beliefs and symbolism associated with birds. The final chapter covers tools—some simple, others sophisticated and richly decorated—made from animal bones.

[more]

front cover of Colorado Byways
Colorado Byways
Thomas P. Huber
University Press of Colorado, 1997

front cover of Connecting the West
Connecting the West
Historic Railroad Stops and Stage Stations in Elko County, Nevada
Shawn Hall
University of Nevada Press, 2002

Shawn Hall's immensely popular guidebooks to Nevada ghost towns have become essential resources for backcountry explorers and scholars alike. Now Hall returns to Elko County to survey the county's railroad and stage stations, as well as other sites not included in his earlier survey of this colorful section of the state. As in his earlier volumes, Hall includes a history of each site he lists, along with period and contemporary photographs, directions for locating the sites, and an assessment of their present condition. His historical accounts, based on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, are both scholarly and engaging, rich in anecdotes and personalities, and in the fascinating minutia of history often ignored by more academic writers. Shawn Hall's dedication to documenting Nevada's thousands of historic sites has enriched our knowledge of the state's relatively brief but very eventful past. Connecting the West is a worthy addition to Hall's remarkable efforts to preserve the state's history.

[more]

front cover of Cultural Resource Management in the Great Basin 1986–2016
Cultural Resource Management in the Great Basin 1986–2016
Alice M. Baldrica, Patricia A. DeBunch, and Don D. Fowler
University of Utah Press, 2019
University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 131

Cultural Resource Management (CRM) refers to the discovery, evaluation, and preservation of culturally significant sites, focusing on but not limited to archaeological and historical sites of significance. CRM stems from the National Historic Preservation Act, passed in 1966. In 1986, archaeologists reviewed the practice of CRM in the Great Basin. They concluded that it was mainly a system of finding, flagging, and avoiding—a means of keeping sites and artifacts safe. Success was measured by counting the number of sites recorded and acres surveyed.

This volume provides an updated review some thirty years later. The product of a 2016 symposium, its measures are the increase in knowledge obtained through CRM projects and the inclusion of tribes, the general public, industry, and others in the discovery and interpretation of Great Basin prehistory and history. Revealing both successes and shortcomings, it considers how CRM can face the challenges of the future. Chapters offer a variety of perspectives, covering highway archaeology, inclusion of Native American tribes, and the legacy of the NHPA, among other topics.
[more]

front cover of Curated Decay
Curated Decay
Heritage beyond Saving
Caitlin DeSilvey
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Transporting readers from derelict homesteads to imperiled harbors, postindustrial ruins to Cold War test sites, Curated Decay presents an unparalleled provocation to conventional thinking on the conservation of cultural heritage. Caitlin DeSilvey proposes rethinking the care of certain vulnerable sites in terms of ecology and entropy, and explains how we must adopt an ethical stance that allows us to collaborate with—rather than defend against—natural processes. 

Curated Decay chronicles DeSilvey’s travels to places where experiments in curated ruination and creative collapse are under way, or under consideration. It uses case studies from the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to explore how objects and structures produce meaning not only in their preservation and persistence, but also in their decay and disintegration. Through accessible and engaging discussion of specific places and their stories, it traces how cultural memory is generated in encounters with ephemeral artifacts and architectures. 

An interdisciplinary reframing of the concept of the ruin that combines historical and philosophical depth with attentive storytelling, Curated Decay represents the first attempt to apply new theories of materiality and ecology to the concerns of critical heritage studies.

[more]

front cover of Denver Landmarks and Historic Districts
Denver Landmarks and Historic Districts
Thomas J. Noel
University Press of Colorado, 2016
A Timberline Book

Denver Landmarks and Historic Districts, Second Edition
is the newest, most thorough guide to Denver’s 51 historic districts and more than 331 individually landmarked properties. This lavishly illustrated volume celebrates Denver’s oldest banks, churches, clubs, hotels, libraries, schools, restaurants, mansions, and show homes.

Denver is unusually fortunate to retain much of its significant architectural heritage. The Denver Landmark Preservation Commission (1967), Historic Denver, Inc. (1970), Colorado Preservation, Inc. (1984), and History Colorado (1879) have all worked to identify and preserve Denver buildings notable for architectural, geographical, or historical significance. Since the 1970s, Denver has designated more landmarks than any other US city of comparable size. Many of these landmarks, both well-known and obscure, are open to the public. These landmarks and districts have helped make Denver one of the healthiest and most attractive core cities in the United States, transforming what was once Skid Row into the Lower Downtown Historic District of million-dollar lofts and $7 craft beers.

Entries include the Daniels & Fisher Tower, the Brown Palace Hotel, Red Rocks Outdoor Amphitheatre, Elitch Theatre, Fire Station No. 7, the Richthofen Castle, the Washington Park Boathouse and Pavilion, and the Capitol Hill, Five Points, and Highlands historic districts.  Denver Landmarks and Historic Districts highlights the many officially designated buildings and neighborhoods of note. This crisply written guide serves as a great starting point for rubbernecking around Denver, whether by motor vehicle, by bicycle, or afoot.
[more]

front cover of Destination Heartland
Destination Heartland
A Guide to Discovering the Midwest's Remarkable Past
Cynthia Clampitt
University of Illinois Press, 2022
The Midwest's place at the crossroads of the nation makes it a rich travel destination for anyone interested in the history and heritage of the United States. Cynthia Clampitt's guide to heartland historical sites invites readers to live the past, whether it's watching a battlefield reenactment or wandering the grounds of an ancient Native American city. From the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center to the Chinese American Museum, Clampitt uncovers the fascinating stories behind these quintessentially Midwestern places while offering valuable tips for getting the most out of your visit. She also ventures beyond the typical scope of guidebooks to include historic restaurants, small-town museums, and other overlooked gems perfect for turning that quick day trip into a leisurely itinerary.

An informative handbook and introduction to the Midwest's colorful past, Destination Heartland provides travelers with a knowledgeable companion on the highways and backroads of history.

States covered in the book: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

[more]

front cover of Digging for History at Old Washington
Digging for History at Old Washington
Mary L. Kwas
University of Arkansas Press, 2009
Positioned along the legendary Southwest Trail, the town of Washington in Hempstead County in southwest Arkansas was a thriving center of commerce, business, and county government in the nineteenth century. Historical figures such as Davy Crockett and Sam Houston passed through, and during the Civil War, when the Federal troops occupied Little Rock, the Hempstead County Courthouse in Washington served as the seat of state government. A prosperous town fully involved in the events and society of the territorial, antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras, Washington became in a way frozen in time by a series of events including two fires, a tornado, and being bypassed by the railroad in 1874. Now an Arkansas State Park and National Historic Landmark, Washington has been studied by the Arkansas Archeological Survey over the past twenty-five years. Digging for History at Old Washington joins the historical record with archaeological findings such as uncovered construction details, evidence of lost buildings, and remnants of everyday objects. Of particular interest are the homes of Abraham Block, a Jewish merchant originally from New Orleans, and Simon Sanders from North Carolina, who became the town’s county clerk. The public and private lives of the Block and Sanders families provide a fascinating look at an antebellum town at the height of its prosperity.
[more]

front cover of Digging in the City of Brotherly Love
Digging in the City of Brotherly Love
Stories from Philadelphia Archaeology
Yamin, Rebecca
Temple University Press, 2023
Historic Philadelphia has long yielded archaeological treasures from its past. Excavations required by the National Historic Preservation Act have recovered pottery shards, pots, plates, coins, bones, and other artifacts relating to early life in the city. This updated edition of Digging in the City of Brotherly Love continues to use archaeology to learn about and understand people from the past.

Rebecca Yamin adds three new chapters that showcase several major discoveries from recent finds including unmarked early eighteenth-century burial grounds, one of which associated with the first African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, in the oldest part of the city; a nineteenth-century working-class neighborhood built along the path of what is now Route I-95 and was once home to Native American life; and the remains of two taverns found on the site of the current Museum of the American Revolution.

Yamin describes the research and state-of-the-art techniques used to study these exciting discoveries. In chronicling the value of looking into a city’s past, Digging in the City of Brotherly Love brings to life the people who lived in the early city and the people in the present who study them.
[more]

front cover of Digging New Jersey's Past
Digging New Jersey's Past
Historical Archaeology in the Garden State
Veit, Richard F
Rutgers University Press, 2002
When people think of archaeology, they commonly think of unearthing the remains of ancient civilizations in Egypt, Greece, Rome, Central or South America. But some fascinating history can be found in your own New Jersey backyard ¾ if you know where to look.

Richard Veit takes readers on a well-organized guided tour through four hundred years of Garden State development as seen through archaeology in Digging New Jerseys Past. This illustrated guidebook takes readers to some of the states most interesting discoveries and tells us what has been learned or is being learned from them. The diverse array of archaeological sites, drawn from all parts of the state, includes a seventeenth-century Dutch trading post, the site of the Battle of Monmouth, the gravemarkers of freed slaves, and a 1920s railroad roundhouse, among others.

Veit begins by explaining what archaeologists do: How do they know where to dig? What sites are likely to yield important information? How do archaeologists excavate a site? How are artifacts cataloged, stored, and interpreted? He then moves through the states history, from the contact of first peoples and explorers, to colonial homesteads, Revolutionary War battlefields, cemeteries, railroads, and factories. Veit concludes with some thoughts about the future of archaeological research in New Jersey and with suggestions on ways that interested individuals can become involved in the field.

[more]

front cover of Embodiment of a Nation
Embodiment of a Nation
Human Form in American Places
Cecelia Tichi
Harvard University Press, 2001

From Harriet Beecher Stowe's image of the Mississippi's "bosom" to Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod as "the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts," the U.S. environment has been recurrently represented in terms of the human body. Exploring such instances of embodiment, Cecelia Tichi exposes the historically varied and often contrary geomorphic expression of a national paradigm. Environmental history as cultural studies, her book plumbs the deep and peculiarly American bond between nationalism, the environment, and the human body.

Tichi disputes the United States' reputation of being "nature's nation." U.S. citizens have screened out nature effectively by projecting the bodies of U.S. citizens upon nature. She pursues this idea by pairing Mount Rushmore with Walden Pond as competing efforts to locate the head of the American body in nature; Yellowstone's Old Faithful with the Moon as complementary embodiments of the American frontier; and Hot Springs, Arkansas, with Love Canal as contrasting sites of the identification of women and water. A major contribution to current discussions of gender and nature, her book also demonstrates the intellectual power of wedding environmental studies to the social history of the human body.

[more]

front cover of Exploring the Land of Lincoln
Exploring the Land of Lincoln
The Essential Guide to Illinois Historic Sites
Charles Titus
University of Illinois Press, 2021

Discovering Illinois through twenty of the state's most important places

​A one-of-a-kind travel guide, Exploring the Land of Lincoln invites road-trippers and history buffs to explore the Prairie State's most extraordinary historic sites. Charles Titus blends storytelling with in-depth research to highlight twenty must-see destinations selected for human drama, historical and cultural relevance, and their far-reaching impact on the state and nation. Maps, illustrations, and mileage tables encourage readers to create personal journeys of exploration to, and beyond, places like Cahokia, the Lincoln sites, Nauvoo, and Chicago's South Side Community Art Center.

Detailed and user-friendly, Exploring the Land of Lincoln is the only handbook you need for the sights and stories behind the names on the map of Illinois.  

[more]

front cover of Frontier Forts of Iowa
Frontier Forts of Iowa
Indians, Traders, and Soldiers, 1682-1862
William E. Whittaker
University of Iowa Press, 2009

At least fifty-six frontier forts once stood in, or within view of, what is now the state of Iowa. The earliest date to the 1680s, while the latest date to the Dakota uprising of 1862. Some were vast compounds housing hundreds of soldiers; others consisted of a few sheds built by a trader along a riverbank. Regardless of their size and function—William Whittaker and his contributors include any compound that was historically called a fort, whether stockaded or not, as well as all military installations—all sought to control and manipulate Indians to the advantage of European and American traders, governments, and settlers. Frontier Forts of Iowa draws extensively upon the archaeological and historical records to document this era of transformation from the seventeenth-century fur trade until almost all Indians had been removed from the region.

The earliest European-constructed forts along the Mississippi, Des Moines, and Missouri rivers fostered a complex relationship between Indians and early traders. After the Louisiana Purchase of 1804, American military forts emerged in the Upper Midwest, defending the newly claimed territories from foreign armies, foreign traders, and foreign-supported Indians. After the War of 1812, new forts were built to control Indians until they could be moved out of the way of American settlers; forts of this period, which made extensive use of roads and trails, teamed a military presence with an Indian agent who negotiated treaties and regulated trade. The final phase of fort construction in Iowa occurred in response to the Spirit Lake massacre and the Dakota uprising; the complete removal of the Dakota in 1863 marked the end of frontier forts in a state now almost completely settled by Euro-Americans.

By focusing on the archaeological evidence produced by many years of excavations and by supporting their words with a wealth of maps and illustrations, the authors uncover the past and connect it with the real history of real places. In so doing they illuminate the complicated and dramatic history of the Upper Midwest in a time of enormous change. Past is linked to present in the form of a section on visiting original and reconstructed forts today.

Contributors: 

Gayle F. Carlson
Jeffrey T. Carr
Lance M. Foster
Kathryn E. M. Gourley
Marshall B. McKusick
Cindy L. Nagel
David J. Nolan
Cynthia L. Peterson
Leah D. Rogers
Regena Jo Schantz
Christopher M. Schoen
Vicki L. Twinde-Javner
William E. Whittaker

[more]

front cover of Ghosts of Glen Canyon
Ghosts of Glen Canyon
History beneath Lake Powell
C Gregory Crampton
University of Utah Press, 2009
Drift down the Colorado River through Glen Canyon and explore the people and places that encompass the history of this majestic canyon before it drowned in the rising waters of Lake Powell.
Author Gregory Crampton led the historical investigations of Glen and San Juan Canyons from 1957 to 1963 under contract with the National Park Service. The objective was to locate and record historical sites that would be lost to the rising waters of the reservoir. This book records that effort.

First published in 1986, this edition has been revised to include several new “ghosts” of Glen Canyon, including a never-before-published foreword by Edward Abbey. It also showcases stunning color photographs by Philip Hyde and includes hundreds of black-and-white photographs taken by the original salvage crews.

This informative guide to the historic treasures of Glen Canyon includes numbered maps keyed to each location. It is a book for both the armchair traveler and the lake enthusiast eager for a journey through the past to a place few had the privilege to know.
[more]

front cover of A Guide to New Jersey's Revolutionary War Trail
A Guide to New Jersey's Revolutionary War Trail
for Families and History Buffs
Di Ionno, Mark
Rutgers University Press, 2000
Hit the road with journalist Mark DiIonno as he takes you on a tour of New Jersey’s extraordinary Revolutionary War history. Listing more than 350 historic sites throughout the state, DiIonno has compiled the most complete guide ever to the Revolutionary War in the Garden State.

New Jersey’s role in the Revolutionary War is widely overlooked. Every school kid learns about the Boston Tea Party but not the Greenwich tea burning; and about the miserable winter at Valley Forge but not Jockey Hollow. Schools fund class trips to Philadelphia’s Independence Hall but not Princeton’s Nassau Hall. To find history in New Jersey, all you need is DiIonno’s book as your guide. His easy-to-read volume helps readers explore the cities and the countryside from Bergen to Cape May County to find out exactly what happened there during the Revolutionary War.

While previously published books center on the highlights — Fort Lee and Washington’s retreat across the state, victories at Trenton and Princeton, the brutal winter encampment at Jockey Hollow and the Battle of Monmouth —  DiIonno fills in the blanks. Battlefields, churches, homes of the famous and infamous, cemeteries, parks, taverns, liberty poles, bridges, creeks, hills, museums, encampment sites, lighthouses, historical societies, walking trails, monuments, plaques—if it played a part in or commemorates the Revolutionary War in New Jersey, DiIonno tells you what happened there, the personalities involved, and how to see it for yourself.

The sites are conveniently cataloged by county, with a helpful summary of the area’s war history beginning each chapter. Each entry lists the town and directions to each site, and where appropriate, a complete address, telephone numbers, and hours of operation. Both public and private sites are described, and DiIonno advises readers of which private sites tours can be arranged.
[more]

logo for Oregon State University Press
A Guide to Oregon South Coast History
Traveling the Jedediah Smith Trail
Nathan Douthit
Oregon State University Press, 1999

front cover of Historic Illinois from the Air
Historic Illinois from the Air
David Buisseret
University of Chicago Press, 1990
"A distinctive and skillful effort to bring facets of Illinois history to a popular as well as an academic audience."—John Hoffman, Illinois Historical Survey, University of Illinois Library
[more]

front cover of Historic Sites and Markers along the Mormon and Other Great Western Trails
Historic Sites and Markers along the Mormon and Other Great Western Trails
Stanley B. Kimball
University of Illinois Press, 1988
Historic Sites and Markers
  is an indispensable guide for travelers who wish to retrace the various frontier
  routes taken by the Mormons and other pioneers in their treks westward. Traversing
  fifteen states from New York to California, Stanley Kimball presents some of
  America's most famous trails--the Mormon, the Oregon-California, the Santa Fe,
  the Overland, and many others--and describes important points of interest, including
  forts, trail centers, and museums.
"An important contribution
  to the history of the West and perhaps the most comprehensive mile-by-mile guide
  to trail markers and historical sites ever prepared."
  -- Brigham D. Madsen, author of The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear
  River Massacre
 
[more]

front cover of Historic Texas from the Air
Historic Texas from the Air
By David Buisseret, Richard Francaviglia, Gerald Saxon, and Jack Graves
University of Texas Press, 2009

The extremely varied geography of Texas, ranging from lush piney woods to arid, mountainous deserts, has played a major role in the settlement and development of the state. To gain full perspective on the influence of the land on the people of Texas, you really have to take to the air—and the authors of Historic Texas from the Air have done just that. In this beautiful book, dramatic aerial photography provides a complete panorama of seventy-three historic sites from around the state, showing them in extensive geographic context and revealing details unavailable to a ground-based observer.

Each site in Historic Texas from the Air appears in a full-page color photograph, accompanied by a concise description of the site's history and importance. Contemporary and historical photographs, vintage postcard images, and maps offer further visual information about the sites. The book opens with images of significant natural landforms, such as the Chisos Mountains and the Big Thicket, then shows the development of Texas history through Indian spiritual sites (including Caddo Mounds and Enchanted Rock), relics from the French and Spanish occupation (such as the wreck of the Belle and the Alamo), Anglo forts and methods of communication (including Fort Davis and Salado's Stagecoach Inn), nineteenth-century settlements and industries (such as Granbury's courthouse square and Kreische Brewery in La Grange), and significant twentieth-century locales, (including Spindletop, the LBJ Ranch, and the Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport).

For anyone seeking a visual, vital overview of Texas history, Historic Texas from the Air is the perfect place to begin.

[more]

front cover of Historical Archaeology of Arkansas
Historical Archaeology of Arkansas
A Hidden Diversity
Carl Drexler
University of Tennessee Press, 2016
Arkansas’s diverse geography, spanning the Ozark Mountains, densely forested Timberlands, and Mississippi River Delta, and its complex Native American and Euro American history belie the inattentive historical treatment the Natural State has thus far received by scholars. Often disparaged as a cultural and intellectual backwater—and indeed perhaps best known for President Bill Clinton and Wal-Mart—this overly simplified image of Arkansas shadows a state rich in historic significance and the archaeological record.

Carl G. Drexler aims to correct this bias in Historical Archaeology of Arkansas. In nine essays that range from Civil War sites to the Ozark Mountains to the nineteenth-century Jewish community, Drexler and his contributors present an Arkansas unknown to all but those dedicated individuals working to publicize the state’s hidden diversity. The research presented herein depicts a strong state and federal commitment to documenting Arkansas’s history, perhaps unmatched by any other state in America, and the success of public archaeology through the efforts of the Arkansas Archaeological Survey.

Historical Archaeology of Arkansas not only showcases the natural beauty and rich history of Arkansas, but it also serves as a primer for historical inquiry for other state and federal organizations looking to bolster their own programs.

Carl G. Drexler is the Archeological Survey's station archeologist for southwest Arkansas and a research assistant professor with the University of Arkansas. His articles have appeared in Archaeology and Historical Memory, Historical Archaeology, American Antiquity, and Field Notes.
[more]

front cover of History after Apartheid
History after Apartheid
Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa
Annie E. Coombes
Duke University Press, 2003
The democratic election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994 marked the demise of apartheid and the beginning of a new struggle to define the nation’s past. History after Apartheid analyzes how, in the midst of the momentous shift to an inclusive democracy, South Africa’s visual and material culture represented the past while at the same time contributing to the process of social transformation. Considering attempts to invent and recover historical icons and narratives, art historian Annie E. Coombes examines how strategies for embodying different models of historical knowledge and experience are negotiated in public culture—in monuments, museums, and contemporary fine art.

History after Apartheid explores the dilemmas posed by a wide range of visual and material culture including key South African heritage sites. How prominent should Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress be in the museum at the infamous political prison on Robben Island? How should the postapartheid government deal with the Voortrekker Monument mythologizing the Boer Trek of 1838? Coombes highlights the contradictory investment in these sites among competing constituencies and the tensions involved in the rush to produce new histories for the “new” South Africa.

She reveals how artists and museum officials struggled to adequately represent painful and difficult histories ignored or disavowed under apartheid, including slavery, homelessness, and the attempted destruction of KhoiSan hunter-gatherers. Describing how contemporary South African artists address historical memory and the ambiguities uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Coombes illuminates a body of work dedicated to the struggle to simultaneously remember the past and move forward into the future.

[more]

front cover of History of the Central Brooks Range
History of the Central Brooks Range
Gaunt Beauty, Tenuous Life
William E. Brown
University of Alaska Press, 2007
The History of the Central Brooks Range uses rare primary sources in order to provide a chronological examination and history of the Koyukuk region—including anthropological descriptions of the Native groups that make the Central Brooks Range and its surroundings their home. The history of early exploration, mining, and the Klondike all overflow into the story of the Koyukuk region and its rich cultural heritage, and William E. Brown provides a fascinating history of the extraordinary ways of survival employed by pioneers in this rugged northern land. Supplemented with detailed descriptions by Robert Marshall, The History of the Central Brooks Range is further enhanced by over 150 beautiful full-color illustrations—from early exploration to the creation of the Gates of the Arctic National Park—making this an essential volume for anyone interested in Alaska Native studies.
[more]

front cover of History Walks in New Jersey
History Walks in New Jersey
Rosenfeld, Lucy D
Rutgers University Press, 2006
New Jersey has a varied and fascinating history-from its earliest Native American settlements, through its central role in the Revolutionary War, to its strategic position in the major events of our country's past. In History Walks in New Jersey, Lucy D. Rosenfeld and Marina Harrison treat readers to a comprehensive statewide guidebook that includes detailed information on forty-eight of the best sites for historical walks. These outings take the history enthusiast through beautiful green landscapes, natural preserves, and picturesque settlements.
  
 Whether you are an amateur historian, a weekend walker, or a teacher planning a class trip, this book will be an essential resource for ideas and information. Walks include the Kingston Loop, a long canal where George Washington, pen in hand, composed his post-Revolutionary War speech, "Farewell Orders to the Armies of the United States." Also included is a mountain walk that traces Native American Leni-Lenape history and one that wends its way into an old Moravian village in the town of Hope. A pirate cove, stops on the Underground Railroad, a Civil War cemetery, and the sites of duels, mines, canals, architectural innovations, estates and resorts, centuries-old agricultural and fishing settlements, and the Hindenburg crash are all here.

Each walk includes directions, information on tours, a brief history, and suggestions for additional places to visit in the area. Whether a New Jersey native or a visitor to the Garden State, readers will enjoy going beyond the highways and suburban towns to learn about history while discovering the state's natural beauty.

[more]

front cover of House of Mourning
House of Mourning
A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre
Shannon A Novak
University of Utah Press, 2008

On September 11, 1857, some 120 men, women, and children from the Arkansas hills were murdered in the remote desert valley of Mountain Meadows, Utah. This notorious massacre was, in fact, a mass execution: having surrendered their weapons, the victims were bludgeoned to death or shot at point-blank range. The perpetrators were local Mormon militiamen whose motives have been fiercely debated for 150 years.

In House of Mourning, Shannon A. Novak goes beyond the question of motive to the question of loss. Who were the victims at Mountain Meadows? How had they settled and raised their families in the American South, and why were they moving west once again? What were they hoping to find or make for themselves at the end of the trail? By integrating archival records and oral histories with the first analysis of skeletal remains from the massacre site, Novak offers a detailed and sensitive portrait of the victims as individuals, family members, cultural beings, and living bodies.

The history of the massacre has often been treated as a morality tale whose chief purpose was to vilify (or to glorify) some collective body. Resisting this tendency to oversimplify the past, Novak explores Mountain Meadows as a busy and dangerous intersection of cultural and material forces in antebellum America. House of Mourning is a bold experiment in a new kind of history, the biocultural analysis of complex events.

Winner of the Society for Historical Archaeology James Deetz Book Award. 
 

[more]

front cover of Household Chores and Household Choices
Household Chores and Household Choices
Theorizing the Domestic Sphere in Historical Archaeology
Edited by Kerri S. Barile and James C. Brandon
University of Alabama Press, 2004

Discusses the concepts of “home,” “house,” and “household” in past societies

Because archaeology seeks to understand past societies, the concepts of "home," "house," and "household" are important. Yet they can be the most elusive of ideas. Are they the space occupied by a nuclear family or by an extended one? Is it a built structure or the sum of its contents? Is it a shelter against the elements, a gendered space, or an ephemeral place tied to emotion? We somehow believe that the household is a basic unit of culture but have failed to develop a theory for understanding the diversity of households in the historic (and prehistoric) periods.

In an effort to clarify these questions, this volume examines a broad range of households—a Spanish colonial rancho along the Rio Grande, Andrew Jackson's Hermitage in Tennessee, plantations in South Carolina and the Bahamas, a Colorado coal camp, a frontier Arkansas farm, a Freedman's Town eventually swallowed by Dallas, and plantations across the South—to define and theorize domestic space. The essays devolve from many disciplines, but all approach households from an archaeological perspective, looking at landscape analysis, excavations, reanalyzed collections, or archival records. Together, the essays present a body of knowledge that takes the identification, analysis, and interpretation of households far beyond current conceptions.

[more]

front cover of Iowa's Archaeological Past
Iowa's Archaeological Past
Lynn M. Alex
University of Iowa Press, 2000
Iowa has more than eighteen thousand archaeological sites, and research in the past few decades has transformed our knowledge of the state's human past. Drawing on the discoveries of many avocational and professional scientists, Lynn Alex describes Iowa's unique archaeological record as well as the challenges faced by today's researchers, armed with innovative techniques for the discovery and recovery of archaeological remains and increasingly refined frameworks for interpretation.

The core of this book—which includes many historic photographs and maps as well as numerous new maps and drawings and a generous selection of color photos—explores in detail what archaeologists have learned from studying the state's material remains and their contexts. Examining the projectile points, potsherds, and patterns that make up the archaeological record, Alex describes the nature of the earliest settlements in Iowa, the development of farming cultures, the role of the environment and environmental change, geomorphology and the burial of sites, interaction among native societies, tribal affiliation of early historic groups, and the arrival and impact of Euro-Americans. In a final chapter, she examines the question of stewardship and the protection of Iowa's many archaeological resources.
[more]

front cover of Iron and Steel
Iron and Steel
A Driving Guide to the Birmingham Area Industrial Heritage
James R. Bennett and Karen R. Utz
University of Alabama Press, 2010

This guidebook of historic iron-production sites is designed to give the reader a factual and illuminating look at the people and events that shaped Birmingham into one of America’s leading steel centers. Iron & Steel is heavily illustrated with both color and historical black-and-white photographs. It can be used while visiting parks or read as a coherent volume before or after a visit.

The book contains chapters devoted to the larger preserved sites open to the public, such as Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark and Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park. It also highlights lesser-known, yet still accessible, sites such as Blocton Coke Ovens Park. The work provides easy-to-follow maps for every site as well as driving directions to the more remote locations, giving visitors easy access to all the notable iron and steel sites in Jefferson, Shelby, Tuscaloosa, and Bibb counties. Each chapter also includes a variety of historical information, with accompanying photographs, in order to present the reader with a detailed and comprehensive account of the Birmingham Iron and Steel District.

Featured sites include: Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park; Shelby Ironworks Park; Billy Gould Coke Ovens Park; Brierfield Ironworks Historical State Park; Oxmoor Furnace Site; Irondale Furnace Park; Helena Rolling Mill Site; Red Mountain Park, Iron Ore Mines; Lewisburg Coke Ovens Park; Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark; Ruffner Mountain Nature Center; Blocton Coke Ovens Park; and Vulcan Park and Museum.

[more]

front cover of Iron in the Pines
Iron in the Pines
The Story of New Jersey's Ghost Towns and Bog Iron
Pierce, Arthur
Rutgers University Press, 1966
Deep in the heart of southern New Jersey lies an area of some 96,000 acres of sprawling wilderness. It is the famous Wharton Tract which the state of New Jersey purchased in 1954 for a watershed, game preserve, and park. Many people know and love these wooded acres. Each year, people by the thousands visit Batsto Village, once the center of the iron industry that thrived on the tract more than a century ago.

With warmth and accuracy, Arthur D. Pierce tells the story of the years when iron was king, and around it rose a rustic feudal economy. There were glass factories, paper mills, cotton mills, and brickmaking establishments. Here, too, were men who made those years exciting: Benedict Arnold and his first step toward treason; Charles Read, who dreamed of an empire and died in exile; Revolutionary heroes and heroines, privateers, and rogues. The author's vivid pictures of day-to-day life in the old iron communities are based upon careful research. This book proves that the human drama of documented history belies any notion that fiction is stranger than truth.

[more]

front cover of It's Official!
It's Official!
The Real Stories behind Arkansas’s State Symbols
David Ware
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2015
Since Arkansas’s creation as an independent territory in 1819, its legislature has officially designated a wide assortment of symbols. Some of these refer to economic mainstays while others attest to the aspirations of those who saw a bright future for their extensive and varied community. This volume’s essays examine each of Arkansas’s officially designated symbols, outlining their genesis, their significance at the time of their adoption, and their place in modern Arkansas. Combining political narratives, natural history, and the occasional “shaggy dog” story, Ware makes a case for considering the symbols as useful keys to understanding both the Arkansas that has been and the one it hopes to be.
[more]

front cover of Legacies of Space and Intangible Heritage
Legacies of Space and Intangible Heritage
Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and the Politics of Cultural Continuity in the Americas
Fernando Armstrong-Fumero
University Press of Colorado, 2017

Legacies of Space and Intangible Heritage is an interdisciplinary exploration of the intersections between the study and management of physical sites and the reproduction of intangible cultural legacies. The volume provides nine case studies that explore different ways in which place is mediated by social, political, and ecological processes that have deep historical roots and that continue to affect the politics of heritage management.

Spaces of human habitation are both historical records of the past and key elements in reproducing the knowledge and values that define lives in the present. Practices, knowledge, and skills that communities recognize as part of their culture—and that a range of legal statutes define as protected intangible heritages—are threatened by increased migration, the displacement of indigenous peoples, and limits on access to culturally or historically significant sites. This volume addresses how different physical environments contribute to the reproduction of cultural forms even in the wake of these processes of displacement and change. Case studies from North and South America reveal a pattern of abandonment and reestablishment of settlements and show how collective memory drives people back to culturally meaningful sites.

This tendency for communities to return to the sites that shaped their collective histories, along with the growing importance granted to intangible heritage, challenges archaeologists and other heritage workers to find new ways of incorporating the cultural legacies that link societies to place into the work of research and stewardship. By examining the politics of cultural continuity through the lenses of archaeology and ethnohistory, Legacies of Space and Intangible Heritage demonstrates this complex relationship between a people’s heritage and the landscape that affects the making of "place."

Contributors: Rani Alexander, Hannah Becker, Minette Church, Bonnie Clark, Chip Colwell, Winifred Creamer, Emiliana Cruz, T. J. Ferguson, Julio Hoil Gutierrez, Jonathan Haas, Saul Hedquist, Maren Hopkins, Stuart B. Koyiyumptewa, Christine Kray, Henry Marcelo Castillo, Anna Roosevelt, Jason Yaeger, Keiko Yoneda

[more]

front cover of Lewis and Clark in Missouri
Lewis and Clark in Missouri
Ann Rogers
University of Missouri Press, 2002
In May 1804 Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Discovery embarked on a seven-thousand-mile journey with instructions from President Thomas Jefferson to ascend the Missouri River to its source and continue on to the Pacific. They had spent five months in the St. Louis area preparing for the expedition that began with a six-hundred-mile, ten-week crossing of the future state of Missouri. Prior to this, the explorers had already seen about two hundred miles of Missouri landscape as they traveled up the Mississippi River to St. Louis in the autumn of 1803.
Lewis and Clark in Missouri focuses on the Missouri chapter of their epic journey, a portion of the story that has been slighted in other accounts. Ann Rogers uses the journals kept by members of the Corps along with many other primary source materials, providing a firsthand perspective on the people, plants, wildlife, rivers, and landscapes the explorers encountered. Beautiful color photographs and illustrations complement the text and support the passages Rogers quotes from the journals.
Brief biographies of Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, John Colter, York, and other members of the expedition tell of their years in Missouri after the journey ended. Today’s followers of the Lewis and Clark Trail can find descriptions of sites to visit in Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois.
Carefully researched, yet highly readable, Lewis and Clark in Missouri will be of great interest not only to Missourians, but also to anyone wishing to learn more about the Corps of Discovery’s historic journey.
[more]

front cover of Looking for Lincoln in Illinois
Looking for Lincoln in Illinois
Historic Houses of Lincoln’s Illinois
Erika Holst
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019

This richly illustrated compendium of twenty-two historic buildings in the Abraham Lincoln National Heritage Area includes houses, a hotel, and an art center, all of which are open to the public. Each site links today’s visitors with a place Lincoln lived, a home of a Lincoln friend or colleague, or a spot that illuminates Lincoln’s era and legacy in central Illinois. Along with dozens of modern and historical photographs, entries contain explorations of historical connections to Lincoln and detailed information about exceptional features and artifacts. Complete with maps, this showcase of Illinois heritage is a handy guide for day trips, extended tours, or armchair adventures.
 
[more]

front cover of Looking for Lincoln in Illinois
Looking for Lincoln in Illinois
Lincoln and Mormon Country
Bryon C. Andreasen
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
Winner, ISHS Superior Achievement Award, 2016

Although they inhabited different political, social, and cultural arenas, Abraham Lincoln and the pioneer generation of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, shared the same nineteenth-century world. Bryon C. Andreasen’s Looking for Lincoln in Illinois: Lincoln and Mormon Country relates more than thirty fascinating and surprising stories that show how the lives of Lincoln and the Mormons intersected.

This richly illustrated and carefully researched book expands on some of the storyboards found on the Looking for Lincoln Story Trail, from the Mormon capital of Nauvoo to the state capital of Springfield. Created by the Looking for Lincoln Heritage Coalition, this trail consists of wayside exhibits posted in sites of significance to Lincoln’s life and career across fifty-two communities in Illinois. The book’s keyed maps, historic photos, and descriptions of battles, Mormon expeditions, and events at inns, federal buildings, and even Lincoln’s first Illinois log cabin connect the stories to their physical locations.

Exploring the intriguing question of whether Lincoln and Mormon founder Joseph Smith ever met, the book reveals that they traveled the same routes and likely stayed at the same inns. The book also includes colorful and engaging looks at key figures such as Brigham Young, various Mormon apostles, and more. Anyone inspired by Lincoln, as well as Mormon and Illinois history enthusiasts, will appreciate this look back at a long-past, but not forgotten, landscape. 
[more]

front cover of Lost on the Freedom Trail
Lost on the Freedom Trail
The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston
Seth C. Bruggeman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022
Winner of the 2023 Society for History in the Federal Government Book Prize
Boston National Historical Park is one of America's most popular heritage destinations, drawing in millions of visitors annually. Tourists flock there to see the site of the Boston Massacre, to relive Paul Revere's midnight ride, and to board Old Ironsides—all of these bound together by the iconic Freedom Trail, which traces the city's revolutionary saga.

Making sense of the Revolution, however, was never the primary aim for the planners who reimagined Boston's heritage landscape after the Second World War. Seth C. Bruggeman demonstrates that the Freedom Trail was always largely a tourist gimmick, devised to lure affluent white Americans into downtown revival schemes, its success hinging on a narrow vision of the city's history run through with old stories about heroic white men. When Congress pressured the National Park Service to create this historical park for the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, these ideas seeped into its organizational logic, precluding the possibility that history might prevail over gentrification and profit.
[more]

front cover of Marked, Unmarked, Remembered
Marked, Unmarked, Remembered
A Geography of American Memory: Marked, Unmarked
Andrew Lichtenstein
West Virginia University Press, 2017
From Wounded Knee to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and from the Upper Big Branch mine disaster to the Trail of Tears, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered presents photographs of significant sites from US history, posing unsettling questions about the contested memory of traumatic episodes from the nation’s past. Focusing especially on landscapes related to African American, Native American, and labor history, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered reveals new vistas of officially commemorated sites, sites that are neglected or obscured, and sites that serve as a gathering place for active rituals of organized memory.


These powerful photographs by award-winning photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein are interspersed with short essays by some of the leading historians of the United States. The book is introduced with substantive meditations on meaning and landscape by Alex Lichtenstein, editor of the American Historical Review, and Edward T. Linenthal, former editor of the Journal of American History. Individually, these images convey American history in new and sometimes startling ways. Taken as a whole, the volume amounts to a starkly visual reckoning with the challenges of commemorating a violent and conflictual history of subjugation and resistance that we forget at our peril.
 
[more]

front cover of Medieval Cityscapes Today
Medieval Cityscapes Today
Catherine A. M. Clarke
Arc Humanities Press, 2019
This book explores medieval cityscapes within the modern urban environment, using place as a catalyst to forge connections between past and present, and investigating timely questions concerning theoretical approaches to medieval urban heritage, as well as the presentation and interpretation of that heritage for public audiences. Written by a specialist in literary and cultural history with substantial experience of multi-disciplinary research into medieval towns, <i>Medieval Cityscapes Today</i> teases out stories and strata of meaning from the urban landscape, bringing techniques of close reading to the material fabric of the city, as well as textual artefacts associated with it.
[more]

front cover of Memorials Matter
Memorials Matter
Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites
Jennifer K. Ladino
University of Nevada Press, 2019
From the sculptured peaks of Mount Rushmore to the Coloradan prairie lands at Sand Creek to the idyllic islands of the Pacific, the West’s signature environments add a new dimension to the study of memorials. In such diverse and often dramatic landscapes, how do the natural and built environments shape our emotions?

In Memorials Matter, author Jennifer Ladino investigates the natural and physical environments of seven diverse National Park Service (NPS) sites in the American West and how they influence emotions about historical conflict and national identity. Chapters center around the region’s diverse inhabitants (Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, African, and Native Americans) and the variously traumatic histories these groups endured—histories of oppression, exploitation, incarceration, slavery, and genocide. Drawing on material ecocritical theory, Ladino emphasizes the ideological and political importance of memorials and how they evoke visceral responses that are not always explicitly “storied,” but nevertheless matter in powerful ways.

In this unique blend of narrative scholarship and critical theory, Ladino demonstrates how these memorial sites and their surrounding landscapes, combined with written texts, generate emotion and shape our collective memory of traumatic events. She urges us to consider our everyday environments and to become attuned to features and feelings we might have otherwise overlooked.
 
[more]

front cover of The Michigan Roadside Naturalist
The Michigan Roadside Naturalist
J. Alan Holman and Margaret B. Holman
University of Michigan Press, 2003

Did you know . . . ?

  • Michigan is seventeenth in oil production in the United States.
  • The Great Lakes are said to be the only glacially produced structures that can be seen from the moon.
  • Michigan was once part of a coral reef.
  • The wood frog is one of the commonest true frogs of moist woodland floors in Michigan today and is able to freeze solid during the winter without harmful effects.

These and many more amazing facts await the curious traveler in The Michigan Roadside Naturalist, J. Alan and Margaret B. Holman's captivating guide to the natural treasures of Michigan. A perfect accompaniment to the classic Michigan Trees and The Forests of Michigan, this user-friendly guide offers a Who's Who of the geology, biology, and archaeology of the Great Lakes State, as well as highway adventures along the state's major routes.

The book begins with an educational yet accessible tour of important points in Michigan's natural and archaeological history, followed by seven road trips based on commonly traveled state routes, moving from south to north in the Lower Peninsula and east to west in the Upper Peninsula. Readers can proceed directly to the road trips or familiarize themselves with the state's treasure trove of fascinating features before embarking. Either way, an informative and fun odyssey awaits the passionate naturalist, amateur or otherwise.

J. Alan Holman is Curator Emeritus of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Michigan State University Museum and Emeritus Professor of Geology and Zoology at Michigan State University. Margaret B. Holman is Research Associate at Michigan State University Museum and Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University.

[more]

logo for Temple University Press
Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory
Michael Wallace
Temple University Press, 1996

front cover of Minnesota Marvels
Minnesota Marvels
Roadside Attractions in the Land of Lakes
Eric Dregni
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

Only in Minnesota can you snap a Polaroid of a fifty-five-foot-tall grinning green man with a size seventy-eight shoe or marvel at the spunk of a Swede who dedicated his life to spinning a gigantic ball of twine. The world’s largest hockey stick, as well as the biggest pelican, prairie chicken, turkey, fish, otter, fox, and loon also make Minnesota their home. Where else can you ponder the mysterious "miracle meat" of Spam in a museum dedicated to pork products or have your head examined by the phrenology machines at the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices? 

Minnesota Marvels is a tour of the inspired, bizarre, brilliant, scandalous, and funny sites around the state. Look up in wonder at the several Paul Bunyan statues, including the original (Bemidji), the tallest (Akeley), and the largest talking version (Brainerd). Ease on down the road to visit the first home of the heel-tapping native of Grand Rapids, Judy Garland, or walk the "main street" of Sauk Centre immortalized by native son Sinclair Lewis. See the birthplaces of Charles Lindbergh, the Mayo brothers, the Greyhound bus, the snowmobile, and the ice-cream sandwich. 

Minnesota is also the home of such attractions as the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and the world’s largest aerial lift bridge in Duluth, and architectural wonders such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist gas station in Cloquet and Frank Gehry’s arresting Weisman Art Museum. Stunning mansions with histories of ghost sightings, the hangouts and lairs of infamous gangsters, and old-fashioned breweries dot the state.

Conveniently organized by town name and illustrated throughout, Minnesota Marvels is the perfect light-hearted guide for entertaining road trips all over the state. 

[more]

front cover of Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade
Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade
Edited by Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin
University of Chicago Press, 2003
How do some monuments become so socially powerful that people seek to destroy them? After ignoring monuments for years, why must we now commemorate public trauma, but not triumph, with a monument? To explore these and other questions, Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin assembled essays from leading scholars about how monuments have functioned throughout the world and how globalization has challenged Western notions of the "monument."

Examining how monuments preserve memory, these essays demonstrate how phenomena as diverse as ancient drum towers in China and ritual whale-killings in the Pacific Northwest serve to represent and negotiate time. Connecting that history to the present with an epilogue on the World Trade Center, Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade is pertinent not only for art historians but for anyone interested in the turbulent history of monuments—a history that is still very much with us today.

Contributors:
Stephen Bann, Jonathan Bordo, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jas Elsner, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Robert S. Nelson, Margaret Olin, Ruth B. Phillips, Mitchell Schwarzer, Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Richard Wittman, Wu Hung
[more]

logo for University of Massachusetts Press
Museums, Monuments, and National Parks
Toward a New Genealogy of Public History
Denise D. Meringolo
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
The rapid expansion of the field of public history since the 1970s has led many to believe that it is a relatively new profession. In this book, Denise D. Meringolo shows that the roots of public history actually reach back to the nineteenth century, when the federal government entered into the work of collecting and preserving the nation's natural and cultural resources. Scientists conducting research and gathering specimens became key figures in a broader effort to protect and interpret the nation's landscape. Their collaboration with entrepreneurs, academics, curators, and bureaucrats alike helped pave the way for other governmental initiatives, from the Smithsonian Institution to the parks and monuments today managed by the National Park Service.

All of these developments included interpretive activities that shaped public understanding of the past. Yet it was not until the emergence of the education-oriented National Park Service history program in the 1920s and 1930s that public history found an institutional home that grounded professional practice simultaneously in the values of the emerging discipline and in government service. Even thereafter, tensions between administrators in Washington and practitioners on the ground at National Parks, monuments, and museums continued to define and redefine the scope and substance of the field. The process of definition persists to this day, according to Meringolo, as public historians establish a growing presence in major universities throughout the United States and abroad.
[more]

front cover of New Jersey Cemeteries and Tombstones
New Jersey Cemeteries and Tombstones
History in the Landscape
Veit, Richard F
Rutgers University Press, 2008

From the earliest memorials used by Native Americans to the elaborate structures of the present day, Richard Veit and Mark Nonestied use grave markers to take an off-beat look at New Jersey’s history that is both fascinating and unique.

New Jersey Cemeteries and Tombstones presents a culturally diverse account of New Jersey’s historic burial places from High Point to Cape May and from the banks of the Delaware to the ocean-washed Shore, to explain what cemeteries tell us about people and the communities in which they lived. The evidence ranges from somber seventeenth-century decorations such as hourglasses and skulls that denoted the brevity of colonial life, to modern times where memorials, such as a life-size granite Mercedes Benz, reflect the materialism of the new millennium. Also considered are contemporary novelties such as pet cemeteries and what they reveal about today’s culture. To tell their story the authors visited more than 1,000 burial grounds and interviewed numerous monument dealers and cemetarians.

This richly illustrated book is essential reading for history buffs and indeed anyone who has ever wandered inquisitively through their local cemeteries.

[more]

front cover of The Night I Freed John Brown
The Night I Freed John Brown
John Michael Cummings
West Virginia University Press, 2016

Winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young People 

Recommended by USA Today for Black History Month as "a blend of history and suspense."

In this novel for young adults, Josh knows there is something about the tall Victorian House on the Harpers Ferry Hill, the one his father grew up in, that he can’t quite put his finger on. And his impossible father won’t give him any clues. He’s hiding something. 

And then there’s the famous John Brown. The one who all the tourists come to hear about. The one whose statue looms over Josh’s house. Why does he seem to haunt Josh and his whole family? When the fancy Richmonds come to town and move right next door, their presence forces Josh to find the answers and stand up to the secrets of the House, to his father—and to John Brown, too.

The historic village of Harpers Ferry comes alive in this young boy’s brave search for answers and a place of his own in this brilliant first novel by John Michael Cummings.

[more]

front cover of Official Guide to Texas State Parks and Historic Sites
Official Guide to Texas State Parks and Historic Sites
New Edition
Laurence Parent
University of Texas Press, 2024

The essential guide to Texas’s state parks and historic sites.

Updated with a new park, Palo Pinto Mountains State Park west of Forth Worth; new historic sites; and scores of beautiful new photographs, the Official Guide to Texas State Parks has all the essential information organized by geographical regions to help you plan your great Texas adventure. The only complete resource of its kind on Texas, Laurence Parent’s Official Guide to Texas State Parks is the trusted source, with more than sixty-five thousand copies sold over the past thirty years.

Praise for Previous Editions

“Texas state-park fans should be thrilled. . . . Official Guide to Texas State Parks is the ultimate book detailing Texas’s state parks.”—Dallas Morning News

“This book will make you want to hit the road to visit the natural splendor of Texas.”—Houston Chronicle

“It’s good enough for a coffee table or a campfire. The Official Guide to Texas State Parks gives you sleek photography, maps, narratives, and loads of information.”—Southern Living

“The newly updated Official Guide to Texas State Parks and Historic Sites . . . has beautiful color photographs and insights on camping, fishing, horseback riding, and other recreational opportunities around the state.”—Texas Journey

[more]

front cover of Old Alabama Town
Old Alabama Town
An Illustrated Guide
Mary Ann Neeley
University of Alabama Press, 2002

Old Alabama Town is a visual and historical chronicle of one of the South's important architectural landmarks—four blocks of 19th-century buildings restored to their original condition, collectively forming an educational village that preserves and displays life as it was lived in Alabama from the 1830s through the 1890s. A creation of the Landmarks Foundation of Montgomery, a nonprofit organization developed in 1967, Old Alabama Town displays the lifestyles and environment of the time period through architecture, decorative arts, and living history. The "town" has been made available for students, secondary school educators for field trips, and to tourists for entertainment and family excursions.

More than 50 historic structures, all formerly in danger of demolition, have been transported from around central Alabama and restored on site. The Living Block of the village allows visitors to explore a log cabin, dogtrot house, carriage house, "shotgun" house, pole barn, schoolhouse, tavern, grange hall, and grocery. The Working Block allows patrons to visit a blacksmith's shop, drugstore, grist mill, cotton gin, woodcarver's shop, print shop, and cookhouse. Additional regions of the village present some of the most significant historic homes to be preserved in the state: the Cram-Lakin House, Thompson Mansion, and the Ordeman-Mitchell-Shaw House, among others.

Designed in full color, this paperback guide is introduced by the author's historical, sociological, and cultural overview of Montgomery. The 45 individual entries detail the history and features of each structure and are supplemented by a map, archival photographs of the buildings, and 60 contempo-rary color photographs. This book will be useful to tourists, preservationists, students and scholars of Alabama history and architecture, and all those interested in an interpretive museum of southern life.

[more]

front cover of Out of Many, One People
Out of Many, One People
The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica
Edited by James A. Delle, Mark W. Hauser, and Douglas W. Armstrong
University of Alabama Press, 2011

Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4

As a source of colonial wealth and a crucible for global culture, Jamaica has had a profound impact on the formation of the modern world system. From the island's economic and military importance to the colonial empires it has hosted and the multitude of ways in which diverse people from varied parts of the world have coexisted in and reacted against systems of inequality, Jamaica has long been a major focus of archaeological studies of the colonial period.
 
This volume assembles for the first time the results of nearly three decades of historical archaeology in Jamaica. Scholars present research on maritime and terrestrial archaeological sites, addressing issues such as: the early Spanish period at Seville la Nueva; the development of the first major British settlement at Port Royal; the complexities of the sugar and coffee plantation system, and the conditions prior to, and following, the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. The everyday life of African Jamaican people is examined by focusing on the development of Jamaica's internal marketing system, consumer behavior among enslaved people, iron-working and ceramic-making traditions, and the development of a sovereign Maroon society at Nanny Town.
 
Out of Many, One People paints a complex and fascinating picture of life in colonial Jamaica, and demonstrates how archaeology has contributed to heritage preservation on the island.
[more]

front cover of A President, a Church and Trails West
A President, a Church and Trails West
Competing Histories in Independence, Missouri
Jon E. Taylor
University of Missouri Press, 2008

Over the past century, three nationally significant histories have vied for space and place in Independence, Missouri. Independence was declared Zion by Joseph Smith, served as a gathering and provisioning point for trails west, and was called home by President Harry S. Truman for sixty-four years. Historian Jon E. Taylor has integrated research from newspapers, public documents, oral histories, and private papers to detail how the community has preserved and remembered these various legacies.

Truman’s legacy would appear to have been secured in Independence via three significant designations—his presidential library opened there in 1957, his neighborhood was designated a national historic landmark in 1972, and his home was declared a national historic site in 1982. However, Taylor argues that Truman’s seeming dominance in the community’s memory is in fact endangered by competition from the other aspects of the town’s historical heritage.

Taylor considers the role Mormon history has played in the city's history and chronicles how the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints returned to Independence to fulfill Joseph Smith's dream of creating Zion in the city, a situation that impacted neighborhoods near the Truman home.  Taylor also examines the city's fascination with the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California trails, detailing how that history was lost and remembered and is now immortalized on the Independence square and in the National Frontier Trails Museum.

In the 1980s, the city council reduced the size of the Truman Heritage District, created to maintain Truman’s association with his neighborhood, after church opposition. At the same time, city officials pushed to make Independence a major tourist destination, a move largely dependent upon the city capitalizing on its association with Truman. These inconsistent policies and incongruous goals have led to innumerable changes in the landscape Truman enjoyed during his legendary morning walks.

 A President, a Church, and Trails West chronicles one city’s struggle to preserve its history and the built environment. Taylor places the role of preservation in Independence not only within the larger context of preservation in the United States but also within the context of American environmental history. This volume is sure to appeal to anyone interested in public history, historic preservation, history and memory, and local history.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Printing Landmarks
Popular Geography and Meisho Zue in Late Tokugawa Japan
Robert Goree
Harvard University Press, 2020

Printing Landmarks tells the story of the late Tokugawa period’s most distinctive form of popular geography: meisho zue. Beginning with the publication of Miyako meisho zue in 1780, these monumental books deployed lovingly detailed illustrations and informative prose to showcase famous places (meisho) in ways that transcended the limited scope, quality, and reliability of earlier guidebooks and gazetteers. Putting into spellbinding print countless landmarks of cultural significance, the makers of meisho zue created an opportunity for readers to experience places located all over the Japanese archipelago.

In this groundbreaking multidisciplinary study, Robert Goree draws on diverse archival and scholarly sources to explore why meisho zue enjoyed widespread and enduring popularity. Examining their readership, compilation practices, illustration techniques, cartographic properties, ideological import, and production networks, Goree finds that the appeal of the books, far from accidental, resulted from specific choices editors and illustrators made about form, content, and process. Spanning the fields of book history, travel literature, map history, and visual culture, Printing Landmarks provides a new perspective on Tokugawa-period culture by showing how meisho zue depicted inspiring geographies in which social harmony, economic prosperity, and natural stability made for a peaceful polity.

[more]

front cover of Ramona Memories
Ramona Memories
Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California
Dydia DeLyser
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
The most important woman in the history of southern California never lived. The eponymous heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson's popular 1884 novel Ramona, a half-Indian beauty raised on a wealthy Mexican rancho, nonetheless left an indelible imprint on southern California's landscape. Within a year of its publication, landmarks identified with Ramona's fictional life - her birthplace, her home, the site of her wedding, and her grave - became important, even canonical parts of a visit to southern California. One could take the Ramona freeway to town, cook like Ramona, and smell like Ramona. The novel's romanticized version of California's Hispanic past also inspired films, songs, musical instruments, jewelry, clothes, beer, wine, canned goods, collectibles, and a play that still draws thirty thousand people annually. Although historians and other writers have acknowledged Ramona's importance in the shaping of southern California's regional identity, there has never been an in-depth study of the origins and evolution of the "Ramona Myth" itself - until now. In Ramona Memories, Dydia DeLyser traces the myth's emergence within the context of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tourist industry. DeLyser explores the establishment of tourist attractions by fans of the novel. She details the stories of individual Ramona enthusiasts who, guided by numerous travel books and articles, wove the text of the novel and its lavishly described locations into their own lives, from pilgrimages to either of the two ranchos acclaimed as Ramona's home to Ramona-themed luncheons and hopeful honeymoon visits to the Wishing Well at her marriage place. Based on more than a decade of meticulous research, Ramona Memories reveals how a fiction - and the real places and products that it inspired - helped to make an idealized past visible, permeating southern California's social memory.
[more]

front cover of Real Philly History, Real Fast
Real Philly History, Real Fast
Fascinating Facts and Interesting Oddities about the City's Heroes and Historic Sites
Jim Murphy
Temple University Press, 2021

Philadelphia is known as the home of vibrant colonial history: the Liberty Bell, the Betsy Ross House, and Independence Hall. But the City of Brotherly Love is also home to—and less well known for—its quirky history. The country’s first quarantine station was located here. One of Philly’s clocks has a face larger than Big Ben’s in London. And a unique skill of Black abolitionist James Forten saved him from a life of West Indian servitude (and “Forten” was not even his real name).  

In Real Philly History, Real Fast, Jim Murphy provides an original tour of the city. He highlights artistic gems including the Dream Garden Tiffany mosaic and Isaiah Zagar’s glittering Magic Gardens. He profiles intriguing historical figures from military leader Commodore Barry to civil rights heroes like Lucretia Mott. Murphy also explores neighborhoods from Chinatown to the Italian Market and the unique architectural details of Carpenters’ Hall and the PSFS building.  

Each chapter provides a pithy story about a historical person or site, along with bullet points featuring interesting oddities, and nearby attractions along with fun facts such as: Why there are so many churches? What is the Philadelphia Eagles’ connection to the U.S. Custom House? Which famous artist may have been Philadelphia’s first nude model? And where was the Liberty Bell secretly damaged? (We didn’t do it!)   

This is Philly history in bites that are as digestible as a soft pretzel with mustard.

[more]

front cover of Remembering Roadside America
Remembering Roadside America
Preserving the Recent Past as Landscape and Place
John A. Jakle
University of Tennessee Press, 2011

The use of cars and trucks over the past century has remade American geography—pushing big cities ever outward toward suburbanization, spurring the growth of some small towns while hastening the decline of others, and spawning a new kind of commercial landscape marked by gas stations, drive-in restaurants, motels, tourist attractions, and countless other retail entities that express our national love affair with the open road. By its very nature, this landscape is ever changing, indeed ephemeral. What is new quickly becomes old and is soon forgotten.
            In this absorbing book, John Jakle and Keith Sculle ponder how “Roadside America” might be remembered, especially since so little physical evidence of its earliest years survives. In straightforward and lively prose, supplemented by copious illustrations—historic and modern photographs, advertising postcards, cartoons, roadmaps—they survey the ways in which automobility has transformed life in the United States. Asking how we might best commemorate and preserve this part of our past—which has been so vital economically and politically, so significant to the cultural aspirations of ordinary Americans, yet so often ignored by scholars who dismiss it as kitsch—they propose the development of an actual outdoor museum that would treat seriously the themes of our roadside history.
            Certainly, museums have been created for frontier pioneering, the rise of commercial agriculture, and the coming of water- and steam-powered industrialization and transportation, especially the railroad. Is now not the time, the authors ask, for a museum forcefully exploring the automobile’s emergence and the changes it has brought to place and landscape? Such a museum need not deny the nostalgic appeal of roadsides past, but if done properly, it could also tell us much about what the authors describe as “the most important kind of place yet devised in the American experience.”
 

John A. Jakle is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Keith A. Sculle is the former head of research and education at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. They have coauthored such books as America’s Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Automobile Age; Motoring: The Highway Experience in America; Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age; and The Gas Station in America.

[more]

front cover of Rising Ground
Rising Ground
A Search for the Spirit of Place
Philip Marsden
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In 2010, Philip Marsden, whom Giles Foden has called “one of our most thoughtful travel writers,” moved with his family to a rundown farmhouse in the countryside in Cornwall. From the moment he arrived, Marsden found himself fascinated by the landscape around him, and, in particular, by the traces of human history—and of the human relationship to the land—that could be seen all around him. Wanting to experience the idea more fully, he set out to walk across Cornwall, to the evocatively named Land’s End.
 
Rising Ground is a record of that journey, but it is also so much more: a beautifully written meditation on place, nature, and human life that encompasses history, archaeology, geography, and the love of place that suffuses us when we finally find home. Firmly in a storied tradition of English nature writing that stretches from Gilbert White to Helen MacDonald, Rising Ground reveals the ways that places and peoples have interacted over time, from standing stones to footpaths, ancient habitations to modern highways. What does it mean to truly live in a place, and what does it take to understand, and honor, those who lived and died there long before we arrived?
 
Like the best travel and nature writing, Rising Ground is written with the pace of a contemplative walk, and is rich with insight and a powerful sense of the long skein of years that links us to our ancestors. Marsden’s close, loving look at the small patch of earth around him is sure to help you see your own place—and your own home—anew.
[more]

front cover of The Road to Blair Mountain
The Road to Blair Mountain
Saving a Mine Wars Battlefield from King Coal
Charles B. Keeney
West Virginia University Press, 2021
“Keeney delivers a riveting and propulsive story about a nine-year battle to save sacred ground that was the site of the largest labor uprising in American history. . . . He unveils a powerful playbook on successful activism that will inspire countless others for generations to come.” —Eric Eyre, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic

In 1921 Blair Mountain in southern West Virginia was the site of the country’s bloodiest armed insurrection since the Civil War, a battle pitting miners led by Frank Keeney against agents of the coal barons intent on quashing organized labor. It was the largest labor uprising in US history. Ninety years later, the site became embroiled in a second struggle, as activists came together to fight the coal industry, state government, and the military- industrial complex in a successful effort to save the battlefield—sometimes dubbed “labor’s Gettysburg”—from destruction by mountaintop removal mining.

The Road to Blair Mountain is the moving and sometimes harrowing story of Charles Keeney’s fight to save this irreplaceable landscape. Beginning in 2011, Keeney—a historian and great-grandson of Frank Keeney—led a nine-year legal battle to secure the site’s placement on the National Register of Historic Places. His book tells a David-and-Goliath tale worthy of its own place in West Virginia history. A success story for historic preservation and environmentalism, it serves as an example of how rural, grassroots organizations can defeat the fossil fuel industry.
[more]

front cover of Road Trip
Road Trip
A Pocket History of Indiana
Andrea Neal
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2016
The bicentennial of Indiana's statehood in 2016 is the perfect time for Hoosiers of all stripes to hit the road and visit sites that speak to the nineteenth state's character. In her book, Andrea Neal has selected the top 100 events/historical figures in Indiana history, some well known like George Rogers Clark, and others obscured by time or memory such as the visit of Marquis de Lafayette to southern Indiana. These highly readable essays and the photographs that accompany them feature a tourist site or landmark that in some way brings the subject to life. This will enable interested Hoosiers to travel the entire state to experience history firsthand. Related activities and sites include nature hikes, museums, markers, monuments, and memorials. The sites appear in chronological order, beginning with the impact of the Ice Age on Indiana and ending with the legacy of the bicentennial itself.
[more]

front cover of Romancing Nevada'S Past
Romancing Nevada'S Past
Ghost Towns And Historic Sites Of Eureka, Lander, And White Pine Counties
Shawn Hall
University of Nevada Press, 1993
Drawing on county records, newspaper microfilm, personal interviews, and on-site investigation, Hall provides the reader with a history of 175 significant sites, rendering a treasury of interesting facts on every page. This book blends history and old photographs with an update on the present condition of each ghost town or landmark. The sites and towns are arranged alphabetically, county by county, for quick reference.
[more]

front cover of Sacred Ground
Sacred Ground
AMERICANS AND THEIR BATTLEFIELDS
Edward Tabor Linenthal
University of Illinois Press, 1991
      Americans have persistently expressed fascination with the nation's most
        famous battlefields through patriotic rhetoric, monument building, physical
        preservation, and battle reenactment. But each site is also a place where
        different groups of Americans come to compete for ownership of cherished
        national stories and to argue about the meaning of war, the importance
        of martial sacrifice, and the significance of preserving the nation's
        patriotic landscape.
      From the anniversary speeches at Lexington and Concord that shaped the
        image of the minuteman to Alamo Day speeches invoking the Texas "freedom
        fighters" of 1836 in support of the contras in Nicaragua; from passionate
        arguments over the placement of Confederate monuments at Gettysburg to
        confrontations between militant American Indian Movement and "Custer
        loyalists" during the Little Bighorn centennial in 1976; from the
        treatment of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor to continuing attempts
        to maintain the purity of these places in the face of commercialization---Sacred
        Ground details the ongoing struggles to define, control, and subvert
        patriotic faith as expressed at these ceremonial sites.
     
 
[more]

front cover of The Sangamo Frontier
The Sangamo Frontier
History and Archaeology in the Shadow of Lincoln
Robert Mazrim
University of Chicago Press, 2006

When Abraham Lincoln moved to Illinois’ Sangamo Country in 1831, he found a pioneer community transforming from a cluster of log houses along an ancient trail to a community of new towns and state roads. But two of the towns vanished in a matter of years, and many of the activities and lifestyles that shaped them were almost entirely forgotten. In The Sangamo Frontier, archaeologist Robert Mazrim unearths the buried history of this early American community, breathing new life into a region that still rests in Lincoln’s shadow. 

Named after a shallow river that cuts through the prairies of central Illinois, the Sangamo Country—an area that now encompasses the capital city of Springfield and present-day Sangamon County—was first colonized after the War of 1812. For the past fifteen years, Mazrim has conducted dozens of excavations there, digging up pieces of pioneer life, from hand-forged iron and locally made crockery to pewter spoons and Staffordshire teacups. And here, in beautifully illustrated stories of each dig, he shows how each of these small artifacts can teach us something about the lifestyles of people who lived on the frontier nearly two hundred years ago. Allowing us to see past the changed modern landscape and the clichés of pioneer history, Mazrim deftly uses his findings to portray the homes, farms, taverns, and pottery shops where Lincoln’s neighbors once lived and worked. 

Drawing readers into the thrill of discovery, The Sangamo Frontier inaugurates a new kind of archaeological history that both enhances and challenges our written history. It imbues today’s landscape with an authentic ghostliness that will reawaken the curiosity of anyone interested in the forgotten people and places that helped shape our nation.

[more]

front cover of Seeing Historic Alabama
Seeing Historic Alabama
Fifteen Guided Tours
Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton
University of Alabama Press, 1996
Revised and updated. Don’t drive anywhere in this state without taking along this useful, handy guide. Originally published in 1982, Professor Hamilton’s much acclaimed Seeing Historic Alabama: Fifteen Guided Tours was enthusiastically received around the state. Reviewers throughout Alabama praised her work, her artist’s eye for landscape and architecture, as well as her “historian’s devotion to fact and motorist’s appreciation for specific directions.” This praise extended beyond the state lines to publications in the greater Southeast, which recommend the volume to readers planning travel to or through Alabama.

Hamilton and Matte's thoroughly revised and updated edition of Seeing Historic Alabama introduces readers to the history of Alabama by way of visits to the buildings and sites where historic events took place, from prehistoric time to the present. Its aim is to appeal to a wide range of readers and travelers—natives and residents of Alabama, students of all ages, newcomers to the state, and tourists. This guide offers tours arranged in geographical segments that can be taken in a few hours, in a day trip, or over the course of several days. A handy guide to keep at ready in the glove compartment for easy reference wherever you travel.
 
[more]

front cover of Seeing New York
Seeing New York
History Walks for Armchair and Footloose Travelers
Hope Cooke
Temple University Press, 1995

Since the 1700s, various ethnic and immigrant groups have been shifting and negotiating their place in New York City. Hope Cooke also struggled to find a "correlation of space" and "sense of belonging" when she returned to the city after spending her adult life living in a place in the Himalayas, the Queen of Sikkim (a tiny kingdom near Nepal). Abroad for so long, she returned with an urgent need to rediscover this city, to "find her way home."

It was not always a comfortable journey for Cooke: "On the days I felt secure, Manhattan's maelstrom was pure energy. On shaky days, the boundlessness made me yearn for limits, or, failing that, at least a vantage point." The book that has emerged is an entertaining and integrated account of New York City's social history, architecture, physical space, and culture. Starting with the American Indian settlements and the early days when the southern-most tip of Manhattan held little more than a bleak outpost of Dutch fur traders, Cooke tracks the economic development and journeys north, from the Village's beginnings as a refuge from dreaded summer fevers to the present day Dominican enclave of Washington Heights.

Written for armchair enthusiasts and walkabout adventurers, this book travels fourteen of the city's distinct and significant neighborhoods. Cooke's guide will make a historical sleuth out of local residents and tourists alike. Her off-the-beaten-path insights and witty observations help decode the urban landscape and reveal how social changes have reworked the city's terrain. Enhancing the narrative are 140 illustrations, including old engravings, maps, and current photographs.



In the series Critical Perspectives on the Past, edited by Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig.

[more]

front cover of Sentinels of History
Sentinels of History
Reflections on Arkansas Properties on the National Register of Historic Places
Mark Christ
University of Arkansas Press, 2000
Sentinels of History was conceived of as a way to mark the turn of the millennium by the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program. This generously illustrated book contains thirty-nine essays, each of which showcases an important Arkansas site and is written by a noted authority. Also included is a location map for these sites and a full appendix providing location information, county by county, for the more than two thousand surviving properties in Arkansas (as of June 1999) that appear on the National Register. The essays are as wide-ranging as Roger Kennedy's placement of the Toltec Mounds at the time of Charlemagne, Donald Harington's sensitive look at the "bigeminal" architecture of the Wolf dogtrot cabin, and Neil Compton's egalitarian tribute to the Boxley Valley Historic District on the Buffalo National River. At least one current color photo of the site and one historic image are included with each essay. In addition, illustrations of the locations or structures listed in the appendix are scattered throughout sections. In all, Sentinels of History serves as a lavish inventory of historic properties in Arkansas at the end of the twentieth century.
[more]

front cover of Simming
Simming
Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning
Scott Magelssen
University of Michigan Press, 2014

At an ecopark in Mexico, tourists pretend to be illegal migrants, braving inhospitable terrain and the U.S. Border Patrol as they attempt to cross the border. At a living history museum in Indiana, daytime visitors return after dark to play fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. In the Mojave Desert, the U.S. Army simulates entire provinces of Iraq and Afghanistan, complete with bustling villages, insurgents, and Arabic-speaking townspeople, to train soldiers for deployment to the Middle East. At a nursing home, trainees put on fogged glasses and earplugs, thick bands around their finger joints, and sandbag harnesses to simulate the effects of aging and to gain empathy for their patients.

These immersive environments in which spectator-participants engage in simulations of various kinds—or “simming”—are the subject of Scott Magelssen’s book. His book lays out the ways in which simming can provide efficacy and promote social change through affective, embodied testimony. Using methodology from theater history and performance studies (particularly as these fields intersect with cultural studies, communication, history, popular culture, and American studies), Magelssen explores the ways these representational practices produce, reify, or contest cultural and societal perceptions of identity.

[more]

front cover of The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg
The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg
Ghosts and Interpreting the Recreated Past
Alena Pirok
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

On any given night, hundreds of guests walk the darkened streets of Colonial Williamsburg looking for ghosts. Since the early 2000s, both the museum and private companies have facilitated these hunts, offering year-round ghost tours. Critics have called these excursions a cash grab, but in truth, ghosts and hauntings have long been at the center of the Colonial Williamsburg project.

The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg examines how the long-dead past comes alive at this living-history museum. In the early twentieth century, local stories about the ghosts of former residents—among them Revolutionary War soldiers and nurses, tavern owners and prominent attorneys, and enslaved African Americans—helped to turn Williamsburg into a desirable site for historical restoration. But, for much of the twentieth century, the museum tried diligently to avoid any discussion of ghosts, considering them frivolous and lowbrow. Alena Pirok explores why historic sites have begun to embrace their spectral residents in recent decades, arguing that through them, patrons experience an emotional connection to place and a palpable understanding of the past through its people.

[more]

front cover of Storming the Heights
Storming the Heights
A Guide to the Battle of Chattanooga
Matt Spruill
University of Tennessee Press, 2003
Following the defeat of Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland at the Battle of Chickamauga, Gen. Braxton Bragg and the Army of Tennessee followed the retreating Federal army to Chattanooga and partially surrounded Rosecrans and his men by occupying Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga Valley, and Missionary Ridge. The Battle of Chattanooga would prove the final defeat of the Confederacy in East Tennessee and open the door to Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign.

In this newly revised second edition of his classic guidebook, Matt Spruill revisits his standard-setting tours of the Chattanooga National Military Park, providing updates and new directions after twenty years of park improvements. He recounts the story of the November 1863 battle of Chattanooga using official reports and observations by commanding officers in their own words. The book is organized in a format still used by the military on staff rides, allowing the reader to understand how the battle was fought and why leaders made the decisions they did.

Unlike other books on the battle of Chattanooga, this work guides the reader through the battlefield, allowing both visitor and armchair traveler alike to see the battle through the eyes of its participants. Numerous tour “stops” take the reader through the battles for Chattanooga, Wauhatchie, Lookout Mountain, Orchard Knob, Missionary Ridge, and Ringgold Gap. With easy-to-follow instructions, extensive and updated tactical maps, eyewitness accounts, and editorial analyses, the reader is transported to the center of the action. With this second edition, Storming the Heights will continue to be the go-to guide for Civil War enthusiasts interested in touring this sacred ground.
[more]

front cover of Sweet Cane
Sweet Cane
The Architecture of the Sugar Works of East Florida
Lucy B. Wayne
University of Alabama Press, 2010
A look at the antebellum history and architecture of the little-known sugar industry of East Florida
 
From the late eighteenth century to early 1836, the heart of the Florida sugar industry was concentrated in East Florida, between the St. Johns River and the Atlantic Ocean. Producing the sweetest sugar, molasses, and rum, at least 22 sugar plantations dotted the coastline by the 1830s. This industry brought prosperity to the region—employing farm hands, slaves, architects, stone masons, riverboats and their crews, shop keepers, and merchant traders. But by January 1836, Native American attacks of the Second Seminole War, intending to rid the Florida frontier of settlers, devastated the whole sugar industry.
 
Although sugar works again sprang up in other Florida regions just prior to the Civil War, the competition from Louisiana and the Caribbean blocked a resurgence of sugar production for the area. The sugar industry would never regain its importance in East Florida—only two of the original sugar works were ever rebuilt. Today, remains of this once thriving industry are visible in a few parks. Some are accessible but others lie hidden, slowly disintegrating and almost forgotten. Archaeological, historical, and architectural research in the last decade has returned these works to their once prominent place in Florida’s history, revealing the beauty, efficiency of design, as well as early industrial engineering. Equally important is what can be learned of the lives of those associated with the sugar works and the early plantation days along the East Florida frontier
[more]

logo for Northwestern University Press
A Time to Gather Stones
Vladimir Soloukhin, Translated from the Russian and with an Introduction by Valerie Z. Nollan
Northwestern University Press, 1993
A Time to Gather Stones is a collection of five essays on cultural, historical, and environmental preservation. Vladimir Soloukhin is well known as one of the founders of the "village prose" movement in Soviet Russian literature. Like other village prose writers, he is disturbed by the ravages of the natural environment caused by planned yet ecologically irresponsible industrialization, and by the willful neglect of both agriculture and rural values. Like them, he is also outraged at the systematic destruction of Russia's monuments and cultural artifacts. In their documentary nature and range of subjects the essays in A Time to Gather Stones expound upon the insights, but also expand the parameters, of the village prose genre. The title essay is an account of the famous Optina monastery, its history and founding, and its fate during the years of Soviet rule.
[more]

front cover of The Wages of History
The Wages of History
Emotional Labor on Public History's Front Lines
Amy Tyson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
Anyone who has encountered costumed workers at a living history museum may well have wondered what their jobs are like, churning butter or firing muskets while dressed in period clothing. In The Wages of History, Amy Tyson enters the world of the public history interpreters at Minnesota's Historic Fort Snelling to investigate how they understand their roles and experience their daily work. Drawing on archival research, personal interviews, and participant observation, she reframes the current discourse on history museums by analyzing interpreters as laborers within the larger service and knowledge economies.

Although many who are drawn to such work initially see it as a privilege—an opportunity to connect with the public in meaningful ways through the medium of history—the realities of the job almost inevitably alter that view. Not only do interpreters make considerable sacrifices, both emotional and financial, in order to pursue their work, but their sense of special status can lead them to avoid confronting troubling conditions on the job, at times fueling tensions in the workplace.

This case study also offers insights—many drawn from the author's seven years of working as an interpreter at Fort Snelling—into the way gendered roles and behaviors from the past play out among the workers, the importance of creative autonomy to historical interpreters, and the ways those on public history's front lines both resist and embrace the site's more difficult and painful histories relating to slavery and American Indian genocide.
[more]

front cover of Wend Your Way
Wend Your Way
A Guide To Sites Along The Iowa Mormon Trail
L. Matthew Chatterley
University of Iowa Press, 2007
The exodus of the Mormon people from Illinois across the Great Plains to the Salt Lake Valley  was the most monumental movement of a people in the settlement of the American West. In 1846, the first pioneers, led by Brigham Young, crossed Iowa, and this proved to be the most difficult part of their journey. The weather, the terrain and emigrants' lack  of experience and preparation tested their faith and strength, but their single-minded desire to reach a safe home in the West forged them into a strong people.

Wend Your Way: A Guide to Sites Along the Mormon Trail tells the story of this great movement through Iowa. Tracing the trail from east to west through 12 counties the guide includes:

• Mormon Trail history for each county
•Directs visitors to the 27 interpretive roadside panels that were constructed on the trail by U.S. National Park Service and Iowa Mormon Trails Association
•Reproduces the poignant illustrations that author L. Matthew Chatterley drew for these wayside exhibits
•Provides a map and directions by county to guide travelers to the route of the Mormon Trail, sites of Mormon camps and settlements and the interpretive roadside panels
•Lists other locations in southern Iowa that visitors will want to explore
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter