Abstracts of Papers Presented
The Spy who Mapped Mammoth Cave
Katie Algeo, Department of Geography and Geology, Western Kentucky University
Cartography has played an important role in cave exploration and management, and Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave has one of the longest histories of cave cartography in the United States. Cartographic advances have progressively improved accuracy, working hand-in-hand with exploration to push the known extent of the cave system. Scholars have written extensively about historic maps of the Mammoth Cave system, but one map created in 1817 has been largely overlooked. So understudied is this map that the catalog of its parent archive contains major errors about its author and map content. The map is generally dismissed as a copy of an earlier map, but there are differences, particularly in annotations. This paper is an initial investigation into what we can learn from seemingly minor variations in the two maps and from greater knowledge of the author’s identity and hypothesized purpose in making the map.
The Need for Swede II: How Do Volvo Television Advertisements Represent Sweden to Americans?
Thomas L. Bell, Department of Geography, University of Tennessee
Ola B. Johansson, Department of Geography, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown
Our research on Volvo cars was first reported at the 2015 Canton, Ohio meeting of this organization. This presentation focuses on ways that the formerly Swedish-owned car company tries to expand on the niche market toehold it has in the American marketplace by touting its Scandinavian values in its recent advertising campaigns. In 2010, Ford sold Volvo to the Chinese company Geely. In addition to introducing technologically advanced car models and building an assembly plant near Charleston, South Carolina, Volvo executives now hope that an emphasis on the Scandinavian ethos in its television and social media advertising will also expand the company’s American market share—a point of departure that might differentiate Volvo from its numerous competitors.
The website iSpotTV.com allowed us to analyze the ways in which post-2012 television ads for Volvo have tried to evoke the qualities of the Swedish/Scandinavian lifestyle. We critique the degrees to which American advertising and marketing firms hired by Volvo have managed to capture these supposedly Scandinavian elements: 1) love of the outdoors and adventure; 2) the love of storytelling; 3) the importance of functionality and simplicity of design elements; 4) the continued emphasis on safety but now mainly embedded within the context of family togetherness; 5) the importance of continuous innovation in both exterior and interior design elements, engine efficiency, electronic displays and detectors of the new car models, and new ways to have a Volvo at one’s disposal without actually buying or leasing it. We offer our assessment of the effectiveness of these recent advertising campaigns.
Virtual GIS for urban vernacular landscape surveys & reconstruction of place: 1850s Wheeling (West) Virginia
Dan Bonenberger, Eastern Michigan University
The reconstruction and interpretation of early American streetscapes constitutes a tremendous challenge for preservationists and Virtual Heritage scholars alike. In historic preservation, reconstruction is taboo due to concerns over uncertainty and authenticity. Wheeling (West) Virginia’s Webster (now 20th street, for example, has been so drastically altered by urban development and redevelopment over the past 160 years that only a single building from the 1850s survives, and is further complicated by a lack of historic photographs.
This paper examines opportunities and challenges associated with a geographic approach to the virtual reconstruction of such places. The methodology includes several important steps beginning with the identification, digitization, and storage of archival evidence. Historic maps were georeferenced with recent orthophotographs in a geographic information system (GIS). Subsequent analysis identified what were likely the earliest surviving contemporary dwellings nearby, which were verified by research in deed and tax records and intensive field recording.
To reconstruct the landscape of 1850s Webster street, 3D digital models were produced in SketchUp that visually reflect the quality of data available for each building. Accurate models of vernacular architecture and other cultural landscape elements were assembled upon a digital terrain model in Unity3D. Finally, in an attempt to transform the digital 3D landscape into a virtual place, the 3D models were exported (along with selected natural and intangible phenomena) into the HTC Vive head-mounted Virtual Reality display. The entire system was evaluated as a tool for historic preservation, cultural geography, education, and interpretation.
The Green Book and Black Chattanooga: Reconstructing Urban Communities of Color through Repeat Photography
Ethan Bottone, Department of Geography, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Repeat photography has been used by geographers to since the 1960s, with a vast majority of this research conducted to study physical landscape changes. In recent years, historical geographers have utilized this method to understand shifting cultural and material landscapes, particularly in rural and roadside environments. Though the focus of numerous historical photographs, urban landscapes have been largely neglected in such studies, despite the dynamic nature of such locales. Communities of color have been especially omitted from urban repeat photography studies, continuing the marginalization of these populations in academic literature. This paper seeks to make an intervention in this field by exploring transformations in an urban community of color through a repeat photography study. Specifically, images and spatial data collected in the Green Book, a travel guide created by African Americans for African Americans during the Jim Crow era, were used to locate and place a series of current photographs to understand changes in the urban landscape of Chattanooga, Tennessee since the 1940s. Centered on East Martin Luther King Boulevard (formerly known as East 9th Street), but including other locations around the city, this study presents preliminary understandings of shifts in Chattanooga’s black urban landscapes. Furthermore, this paper discusses the difficulties of conducting repeat photography studies in historical communities of color, which have been marginalized through institutional racist practices that undermine their historical integrity. Through this study, however, a deeper understanding of the historical legacies of black life in Chattanooga is developed and presented for future scholarly research and/or community engagement.
Remembering Childhood: Adult Memories of Aruba Six Decades Later
Dawn S. Bowen, Department of Geography, University of Mary Washington
How do adults recollect their childhoods? In the late 1920s, an American oil company was established on Aruba. By the 1950s, the gated community was filled with families, the largest proportion of whom were American, but there were Dutch and English expatriates as well. It was a slice of American suburbia recreated on a desert island. The children who grew up on Aruba are today in their seventies and eighties, yet their memories are vivid. This was a paradise for a child, an entire two square miles of a blend of suburb and nature where a child had the freedom to explore. Two sides of the compound were the waters of the Caribbean Sea; the other two were the walls beyond which some rarely ventured. I conducted 14 semi-structured, hour-long interviews with people who were born on Aruba and graduated from Lago High School between 1954 and 1966. Former residents who have not lived there in more than five decades share both a strong place attachment and sense of place. The most frequent word used by adults describe their childhood on Aruba is “idyllic.” Their remembrances offer a rich interpretation of how children, and later teenagers, experienced this very special community and the relationships that they established with their peers and the place that most of them knew only as home.
The Blue Highway: US Route 10
Wayne Brew, Assistant Professor of Geography Montgomery County Community College
Photographs by Catherine Brew
From 1926 to 1969 US Route 10 connected Detroit, Michigan to Seattle, Washington. Starting in 1969 the western end of Route was subsumed by I-94 and I-90. In 1987 the eastern terminus was truncated to Bay City, Michigan with the western end in West Fargo, North Dakota. US Route 10 is one of two interstates that includes a ferry ride. The ride between Manitowoc, WI and Ludington, MI is 62 miles of “Blue Highway” (not to be confused with the wonderful book of the same name by William Least Heat-Moon). In June of 2019 my daughter Catherine “Cat” Brew and I traveled US Route 10 following the older pathways of the road as found on USGS historical topographic maps. This illustrated presentation is a summary of our adventures along the 565 miles of US Route 10.
The Invisibility of Pre-Mennonite Settlement History in Mountain Lake, MN 1870-1890
Lisa Brownell, Ohio Development Services Agency
When the railroad came through in 1871, putting Mountain Lake, MN on the map, it began to develop as so many other typical midwestern towns. Early settlers were primarily from northeastern states coming west to the latest edge of the frontier. The town grew to have a depot, a hotel, several stores, blacksmiths, a school, and saloon. Then the Mennonites arrived in 1873 and the trajectory of Mountain Lake’s development changed forever. Approximately 1,800 individuals arrived from Russia seeking religious freedom. It wasn’t long until Mennonites made up a majority of the town’s residents, business owners, and farmers in the surrounding townships. In many histories of Mountain Lake, the story begins when the author’s forbears arrived; earlier settlement gets a short footnote at best. But the transition to majority-Mennonite wasn’t immediate.
Pre-Mennonite settlement in Mountain Lake conformed to the village plat laid out by the railroad company and in the surrounding countryside followed the typical patterns of frontier settlement found in township and range land survey areas. Mennonite settlers did not arrive in an unpopulated place, but instead many were able to purchase improved land and farmsteads already arranged in a dispersed configuration. The new arrivals brought many aspects of their culture with them but did not apply European village and farm land-use patterns to the Minnesota frontier.
This paper explores the impact of the first wave of settlers, how they shaped what came after, and clues to that story that can be observed still in Mountain Lake.
Aldo Rossi’s Kitchenware Models as the Mediator of the Irreconcilable: Analogue, Artifact and the Desire of the Object
Dijia Chen, University of Virginia
Architectural models are commonly referred to as either design apparatus or presentation tools. Both definitions presume architectural models as physical realization of human thoughts, exclude models from the field of architectural theory, and deny the possibility of models as productive agents in constructing narratives of their own. Models, by an inclusive definition, mediate between theory and reality with the potential of reconciling the incompatibles. In this research, I investigate Aldo Rossi’s giant coffee vessel models exhibited in “the Domestic Theater” project as the mediator between conflicting ideas in his architectural and urban theory to challenge the common definitions of architectural models as conceptual realization of design ideas or as scaled representation of built works. The coffee vessel models, generated from the imagery hallucinations and physical productions of Rossi’s Alessi series, are repeatedly inscribed with new significations which analogically refer to various incompatible prototypes. As analogues both modeled on human beings and lifeless artifacts, domestic objects and theatrical settings, fictional scenes and real-world utensils, the scale-less and displaced kitchenware models frame and accommodate the irreconcilable, and allow them to dialogue with and penetrate one another in its physical existence. By analyzing the kitchenware models’ development process through analogy and repetition, I posit models as autonomous, generative and impenetrable object-subjects that reconcile the contradictories and complete the unspoken, unconscious part of Rossi’s architectural theory. Bringing new perspectives to the functioning of models in a disciplinary sense, I argue that the physical existence of the kitchenware models, not textual elaborations and logical deductions, master Rossi’s unresolved struggle between dissonant yet irreducible forces to achieve “the difficult whole”. The research therefore calls for re-examinations on the role of models in architectural theory in a broader sense.
Reorienting Productive Technologies toward Death in the Material Cultures of Capital Punishment
Alex R. Colucci, Kent State University
Contemporary capital punishment in the United States—typically carried out through lethal injection—most often occurs in a highly medicalized and secluded execution chamber inside state-level prisons. However, the material process and technologic organization of these lethal injection executions have not developed in isolation. Indeed, they carry on a legacy of industrialized killing within what could today be understood as a post-industrial landscape of capital punishment. Capital punishment—as a phenomenon that developed in the Western context between the 15th and 17th centuries—has its origins as a materially violent, death-oriented disciplinary technique that was justified in liberal democracies as a moral necessity through which capitalist values could be instilled. Through successive developments in the dominant methods of formal state-sanctioned execution—electrocution and lethal gas in particular—these necrotechnologies are derived from and reflect the wider industrialized landscapes in which they are situated. Electricity and the chemical compounds used to produce poisonous gasses in execution chambers have elsewhere been vital energy sources in advancing technological development over the past two centuries. In other words, where these technologies aid in development schemes elsewhere, within the penal system they are, rather, oriented toward producing deaths that are meant to aid in the disciplined governance of labor. This paper assesses these preconditions and developments in the spatial arrangement of capital punishment through the dual lenses of recent work in geography that emphasize a focus on both material violence and on materialist cultures to understand the industrial legacies embodied in contemporary lethal injections.
From “Broomcorn Capital of the World” to Old Order Amish and the Hippie Memorial: Murals and the “Art” of Placemaking in Arcola, Illinois.
Michael Cornebise, Department of Geology/Geography, Eastern Illinois University
Arcola, Illinois, a city of 2,864 people located along Interstate 57 in East Central Illinois, refers to itself both as the “Broomcorn Capital of the World” as well as the gateway to the largest Old Order Amish settlement in the state (and reportedly the fourth largest in the country). It is also home to what has been dubbed the world’s only hippie memorial. In 2012, Arcola commissioned a collective group of artists known as the Walldogs to produce 15 “historic” murals as part of a broader community beautification project. Mural themes were carefully chosen to showcase designated features of the city’s heritage and cultural landscape. This presentation aims to “paint a portrait” of Arcola’s development history and shifting geographic patterns through an examination of the city’s interpretive murals and displays.
Barn Quilts in the Shawano County, Wisconsin Area.
John A. Cross and Heike Alberts, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
Over 300 barn quilts were put on barns in the Shawano County, Wisconsin area since 2010. This paper describes the project, backed by the local chamber of commerce and now promoted by Tourism Wisconsin, which placed these colorful designs. It explores the motivations of farmers who display the barn quilts and looks back at several previous efforts to beautify Wisconsin’s barns.
Owners of 150 barns with barn quilts in the study area were mailed questionnaires in February 2019 regarding their decision to obtain a barn quilt, their selection of the design and its placement, their satisfaction with their barn quilt, and their perceptions regarding the impact of the barn quilts upon local tourism and other benefits to their community. The 65 percent of recipients who responded indicated that most barn quilts were displayed on the front gable of their barn and that the pictures they were shown of quilt designs was the most common reason for their choice of their design. The most important motivation for displaying a barn quilt was liking those displayed on neighboring farms.
‘Masonic Urbanism in industrializing Victorian Belfast’
Steven Donnelly, Queen’s University Belfast
Belfast in the pre-partition Irish spatial-temporal context saw steady urban growth during the Victorian period as a result of industrial and colonial forces, consolidating its place within the British Empireas a key port at the peak of its global reign. As the town (which was formally recognized as a city in 1888 via Royal Charter) became increasingly urbanized, it also saw significant growth in subscription to the Masonic Order and the Grand Lodge of Ireland. Men of gentry belonging to a plethora of occupations and fields, as well as royalty and nobility, were amongst those who populated the registers and regularly met in spaces scattered across the town center. These men were initiated into the sublime mysteries of Freemasonry. However, these spaces held special esoteric meaning, obscured by symbolism applicable to Masonic pedagogy, identity, and ritual performance. Interestingly, in the early Victorian period, they were either meeting in temporary spaces such as public houses which held no permanent structures or connections to the order, or dedicated apartments decorated, funded and maintained by a number of lodges and their brethren. It wasn’t until the 1860’s when the need for a large-scale and permanent development became a necessity, resulting in the Arthur Square Masonic Hall (c.1868). This paper utilizes the Masonic biography and a range of archival sources relating to esteemed architect and renowned Masonic master Sir Charles Lanyon (1813-1889) to generate a narrative which explores the consolidation of new Masonic meeting places at this time, their esoteric spatial parameters, the Order’s quasi-public ritualistic performances, as well as their imperial allegiances to the crown at the height of Empire.
Cassette Culture as an Alternative Music Distribution System
Robert Drew, Professor of Communication, Saginaw Valley State University
The cassette is a pervasive presence in histories of 1980s indie music. In particular, the format took on three central applications within independent music: it served as a means of mentoring and connection among musicians and bands; it facilitated and decentered the process of auditioning for live gigs and recording contracts; and it allowed formal distribution in the form of cassette-only releases. In all these capacities, the cassette served simultaneously as a practical instrument of music diffusion and commerce and as a token of intimacy, community, and accessibility – values essential to indie’s self-image. And if the cassette served indie, indie returned the favor by highlighting both the commercial potential and the interpersonal resonance of the format, thus helping to save the cassette from its reputation as a mere facilitator of unauthorized, piratic exchange. At the same time, the cassette forced indie scenes to acknowledge the limits of their communitarian ethos.
The Place of Books in International Social Movements
Sherrin Frances, Associate Professor of English, Saginaw Valley State University
OWS activists took over New York City’s Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, and within a couple of weeks it had become a tiny model of a robust city, including areas for kitchens and first aid, music, general assembly meetings, and child care. Remarkably, this camp also included a library with several thousand physical books. The activists named it the OWS People’s Library, and it included makeshift shelves, cataloging systems with free access to books, and lending guidelines. Library patrons could borrow a wide array of literature and non-fiction, and they could attend musical events, readings, or play games within the space.
The People’s Library inspired a wave of similar libraries across the country and the world. Between ٢٠١١ and ٢٠١٦, other social protest movements began to include libraries: The Gezi Park protests in Turkey, the EuroMaidan revolution in Ukraine, the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, and the #NuitDebout protests throughout France. However, while the People’s Library was the biggest and received the most press, it wasn’t, in fact, the first. That recognition belongs to the BiblioSol library in the Indignados encampment in Madrid earlier in 2011.
These spaces are unquestionably libraries and, yet, despite the clear identity markers, almost everything about protest libraries defies logic. They are labor-intensive, temporary installations in parks and city squares, poorly protected from the weather, at odds with security forces, and destined for eviction. Many only lasted in their initial physical state for a few weeks. This talk will address some of the fundamental questions that these libraries inspire:
Why libraries at all?
Why did they emerge within such a clearly defined window of time from 2011 to 2016?
Why are the libraries grounded in a material presence rather than a digital one?
Described as Truly Canadian: Extant Examples of Detroit’s Early Colonial French Vernacular Architecture
Christopher Fuerstnau, Historic Preservation Program, Eastern Michigan University
For many American architectural historians, the modern term “French vernacular” has quickly become a “catch-all” definition for roughly defining the majority of dwellings that resided in the colonization of New France. By examining the differences in the construction styles from Northern Canada (Acadia), Lower Canada and the St. Lawrence River Valley, which migrated to the southern locus at colonial Detroit, we can trace a more accurate pattern of adaptive cultural style.
Although Fort Pontchartrain at Detroit, as well as other local civilian/ military instillations at Ft. Miami and Ft. St. Joseph, were influenced by French military construction of poteaux en terre for over 125 years, French vernacular architecture in contrary, followed predominantly a French-Canadian adaption of construction from the lower Canadian and the St. Lawrence regions called piéce-sur-piece. which the Building Research for the National Research Council of Canada claims, “is the only method of construction that can be described as truly Canadian.” This paper will briefly discuss the impact of vernacular forms that disseminated from the cultural hub of the Detroit area, the traditional academic idea of isolated entries of vernacular style, which claims that the architecture style of the French West Indies can trace its “origin point” into the U.S. solely through Detroit.
The examination of local, French colonial vernacular will be at a time slightly before the American Period, but it will show its residing influence after. It will not include high architecture found later in the chateauesque style of Detroit’s Hecker House, or that of the early austere beauty seen in St. Anne’s Cathedral. It will bring into perspective a clearer view of what the predominant house vernacular of French construction was, and how it represented the architectural landscape (1701-1830) that made up the colonial vernacular buildings surrounding the Detroit area.
Ruralism, Organicism, and the Movement to Transform Britain’s Canals in the Mid-Twentieth Century
Jules P. Gehrke, Associate Professor of History, Department of History, Saginaw Valley State University
By 1945, Britain’s canal system, as a mode of industrial transport, appeared to most to have been permanently eclipsed by the development of rail and the significant expansion of paved highways across the nation. Constructed at the dawn of the industrial era, the system was characterized by a web of channels connecting important industrial and urban centers and mediated by existing rivers. Ownership of both boats and canals was divided, with no effective strategy of national coordination or revivification having taken place. By 1945, many canals were falling into disrepair or had been abandoned. In the eyes of many, the diminishing population of those who worked, and sometimes lived, on canal boats appeared an anachronism beset by a plethora of social dysfunctions. Yet, the nation’s crumbling canal network, with its unique industrial, ecological and human heritage, began to attract the attention of an intrepid group of advocates arguing for the system’s renewal. They argued not only for the system’s ongoing industrial potential, but for the unique place of canals within the nation’s ecological and cultural identities. In making their arguments, they drew upon themes of ruralism and organicism, often associated with efforts to defend the countryside against forces of modernization and centralization. Study of the movement to save Britain’s canals highlights links between ruralist and organicist thought and advocacy of the nation’s canal system, reveals how ruralist and organicist rhetoric was re-calibrated by canal enthusiasts after the Second World War, and reaffirms the significance of canals in understanding evolving conceptions of the twentieth-century countryside.
“An insult to every man who wore the blue”: White reconciliation, economic opportunism, and Chicago’s Confederate Monument
Joy M. Giguere, Assistant Professor of History, Penn State York
While increased attention has been paid in recent years by scholars to Confederate monuments and memorialization, particularly with the 2017 protests resulting in violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and monument removals in cities across the country, historians have yet to seriously address the presence and function of such examples of public memory in the North. This paper examines the history and controversies related to the first major Confederate monument erected in northern territory, the Chicago Confederate monument, erected and dedicated in 1895 in Oak Woods Cemetery, the final resting place of 6,000 Confederate soldiers who died while prisoners of war at Camp Douglas. News reports from the era reveal that southern ex-Confederates regarded the movement to erect the monument as a significant olive branch in efforts toward white reconciliation while northerners, particularly Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) camps across the nation, were intensely divided on the propriety of A) erecting a Confederate monument in the North, and B) dedicating it on May 30th, Memorial Day. In addition to fostering reconciliation between Union and Confederate veterans, the monument’s dedication just two years after the World’s Columbian Exposition represented a self-conscious effort on the part of Chicagoans to place a symbol on its landscape that conveyed the message of the great midwestern metropolis as friendly to the South. As such, orators at the dedication repeated the message that southern states should establish business relations with Chicago at once. In short, the function of Chicago’s Confederate monument was therefore twofold: it was the first significant northern memorial to Confederate soldiers that reflected a desire to honor the Confederate dead as equals to the Union dead, and thus foster white reconciliation between veterans and civilians; and its dedication represented a smart tactic for city leaders who sought to bring southern business interests northward to Illinois.
Restoring a Lost Diamond—And Its Real History
Gary Gillette, Friends of Historic Hamtramck
Hamtramck Stadium was home to the Negro League Detroit Stars in the 1930s. In the late twentieth century, however, standard historical reference sources showed Hamtramck Stadium as demolished, its existence having been conflated with nearby Keyworth Stadium, a site for high school football.
Yet Hamtramck Stadium’s historic field and a large portion of its grandstand remain today on the city’s south side, awaiting restoration that will begin this fall or next spring. It is one of only five extant former home ballparks of major Negro League baseball teams from 1920–1950.
Seventeen members of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown played in Hamtramck, including the legendary Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. Though the Negro Leagues left in 1938, the Stadium was a prominent local sports venue until 1997. Hamtramck’s integrated 1959 Little League World Series champions played there, as did uncounted other amateur & semi-pro baseball, football, softball, and soccer teams. The Stadium also hosted boxing matches and community events.
How was Hamtramck Stadium lost to history? In 1930, white club owner John Roesink relocated the Stars to Hamtramck, a small Polish American city surrounded by Detroit. It was a logical business decision that decades later seemed inexplicable. Along the way, the existence and historical significance of Hamtramck Stadium became obscured as well, for reasons that will be explained in this presentation.
Dead Reckoning: Thoughts on the Future of Rural and Urban Cemeteries and Their Preservation.
Margaret M. Gripshover, Professor, Department of Geography and Geology, Western Kentucky University
Every county in the United States has cemeteries. Death is simply a fact of life and landscapes of the dead are ubiquitous reminders to all of us that while this mortal coil is short in duration, cemeteries appear to live forever. Or do they? The purpose of this paper is to discuss the future of the traditional American cemetery as integral yet endangered elements of the landscape, and how shifting generational attitudes toward traditional burial practices combined with widespread failure to manage burial grounds in perpetuity, present complex legal, financial, and moral dilemmas for the living. The case study that inspired this research is a cemetery restoration project in Madison County, Kentucky, and involves just two of the thousands of orphaned and abandoned cemeteries in the state.
The Transnational Memorialization of Alfonzo R. Castelao
Kathryn L. Hannum, Kent State University
Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao (1886-1950) was a Galician politician, author, artist, and philosopher, now widely considered to be the father of the Galician nationalist movement, and a man who is purposefully memorialized in the landscape of several nations. Castelao’s articulation of a Galician identity as something other than Spanish helped to propel the Galician national movement forward in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Through his writing of the influential text Sempre en Galiza (1944), essays for the Galician republican journal A Nosa Terra, and other Spanish and Galician publications, Castelao unified Galicians, Galician exiles, and Galician emigrants into one trans-national Galician nation. This paper analyzes Castelao on the toponymic memorial landscape and utilizes methods of scaling commemorative place names to produce a transnational memorial geography of Castelao. Analyzing the spatial distribution and scaling of memorials dedicated to Castelao reveals two things: the strong transnational connections between Galicia and its Argentinian diaspora and the utilization of Castelao to satisfy national narratives within Spain. Analysis of the toponymic memorials to Castelao in Spain and Argentina suggests that Castelao’s presence as a memorial entity is dependent upon the political leaning of the Spanish locale in question and unites Galician diasporic communities through a solidification of a national hero abroad.
Pastures of Plenty: The Columbia River Ballads of Woody Guthrie
Katherine J. Heslop, University of Nevada, Reno
Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign speech in Portland, Oregon, presented an abstract idea for federal electric-power development as a progressive response to the hard times of the Great Depression. Ideological concepts were conveyed to denote a federal “Promised Land” of socioeconomic utopianism centered on Columbia River development. As part of New Deal policy (c. 1933-1939), federal agencies attempted to persuade citizens of the Pacific Northwest to accept a new, tangible landscape and culture imbued with technocratic regionalism to define a Columbia Valley Authority (CVA). The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) as part of this campaign, employed folk singer Woody Guthrie to write Columbia River ballads – twenty-six songs in twenty-eight days – celebrating the Columbia River Basin, hydroelectric dams, and government projects for a 1941 promotional film. Guthrie’s lyrics dramatized the Dust Bowl refugees’ plight through dystopic, transformative, and utopic landscapes, accepting Roosevelt’s populist premise: a Promised Land would redeem working people and create a thriving landscape more fair and just for all. These songs pointed to Guthrie’s deep connections to migrancy and the forgotten man. With so much of the country in upheaval, Guthrie’s apparent devotion to the populist cause was due to profound human dislocation rather than a subversive challenge to the American way of life. After the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States entry into World War II, Guthrie’s work was shelved while the BPA refocused its priorities on promoting hydropower for defense industries, as Guthrie’s work would later resurface in the 1949 federal film, The Columbia.
Curbside Gasoline Pumps: Material Culture and Law
Ellen Hostetter, University of Central Arkansas
The starting point for this paper is that utterly ordinary piece of American material culture—the gasoline pump—and its evolution in the 1910s and 1920s, when the location of gasoline pumps underwent a major shift: from curbside to drive-in stations. Entrepreneurs certainly drove this shift, but city officials and the courts codified it. In the 1910s city after city passed ordinance after ordinance banning curbside pumps, which were upheld by the courts.
I am interested in expanding this regulatory story, by detailing alternative ordinances that did not seek to ban curbside pumps, but regulate them with licensing fees, in three states: New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Telling the story of these ordinances highlights the link between material culture and law, a link worth exploring for two reasons.
First, it highlights a theoretical point. Material objects occupy a physical place in our everyday life and a conceptual place in our community’s ordinances, laws, and regulations. Seemingly small changes to the material culture that surrounds us can be a powerful catalyst for asking questions about who has a right to do what, where, under what conditions. The answers to these questions, in turn, have material effects.In the case of curbside gasoline pumps, city officials worried about unregulated free market competition. Almost anyone could install a curbside pump and get themselves into the gas station business. Licensing ordinances to regulate curbside pumps were attempts to narrow who could sell gas, which effectively narrowed what a gas station could be as a landscape type. Second, these conversations from the past are relevant today, in relation to the most recent trend in gasoline retailing, mobile fueling.
Sports Infrastructure, Sports Entertainment, and Reshaping Place in St. Louis
Douglas A. Hurt, University of Missouri
Sports landscapes are playing an increasing role in urban development in the United States, remaking central cities as economic activities like manufacturing have declined in recent decades. Reconstructing the built environment to emphasize tourism, entertainment, and cultural spectacle is designed fill this economic void and to also modify city skylines and promote new urban identities. In St. Louis, Missouri use of sports infrastructure to modify the city’s urban landscape has intensified since the early 1990s, creating a sports entertainment district. Although this region is currently in formation and its ultimate success isn’t guaranteed, the St. Louis Sports Entertainment District is currently altering the landscape of St. Louis. Four sports facilities—three completed and one proposed—comprise the core of the region. They are surrounded by an irregularly shaped sports entertainment domain of businesses (including bars, restaurants, and hotels) that directly benefit from sports events as well as parking lots and structures that provide necessary infrastructure on game days. This paper assesses the historical evolution of the four current St. Louis sports facilities and formation of the St. Louis Sports Entertainment District in greater detail.
Educating with Skins and Bones: Material representations of animals in permanent exhibits at local parks
Rebecca A. Johns, Department of Society, Culture and Language, University of South Florida St. Petersburg
Rachelle Pontes, Department of Florida Studies, University of South Florida St. Petersburg
Permanent and interactive exhibits are common material artifacts at nature parks in the United States. Exhibits are designed to represent features of local ecosystems and convey important information about environment and place. While the environmental education literature has touched on exhibits as components of park programs, no one has yet applied a material culture analysis to deepen our understanding of the work that exhibits do to engage and educate visitors. This paper uses material culture analysis to investigate permanent educational exhibits at two nature parks in Florida. Animal bodies preserved through taxidermy stand beside displays of skeletons, skulls, individual bones, and the pelts of various animals; nearby, live animals are confined to cages and terrariums, while wild creatures populate the parks’ outdoor spaces. We argue that, through acts of prosopopoeia, the bodies, skins, bones, and skulls of resident animals “speak” about human valuation of nature. Through rhetorical analysis of visual, tactile, sensory and textual aspects of the exhibits, we answer the following questions: What narratives of environmental relationships are created by the material artifacts in the exhibits? What story is told about the meaning of lived-in places through these tangible remnants of life? What do bones and skins signify about our cultural response to non-human others, and how are such messages modified by the nearby presence of living animals? What longing in park visitors do these objects act upon? How do the exhibits convey expectations about individual values and behaviors? And, finally, what silences appear in the story told by the artifacts? This work occurs at the intersection of environmental education, animal geographies, and material culture analysis. As environmental educators seek to increase their impact on the American public in a time of mounting environmental woes, permanent exhibits are an overlooked and little understood resource.
From Kalamazoo to Pretty Prairie: The Cultural Value of Musical Performance and Low-Cost Musical Instruments in Rural Indiana, 1930-1955.
Matt Jones, Historic Preservation Program, Eastern Michigan University
Today, Kalamazoo guitars are a minor holy grail to many guitarists in the Upper Midwest. Manufactured during the Great Depression and discontinued shortly after, Gibson’s affordable Kalamazoo series was designed to meet the needs of a population unable to purchase high-quality musical instruments. This paper, drawing on archival research and oral history across two states, describes the impact of Kalamazoo guitars on rural, northern Indiana farm culture and the community-based musical gatherings initiated by that culture. Using the author’s great-grandfather, owner of a 1933 Kalamazoo KG-11 as a case study, this paper describes how rarely-congregating Indiana farming families instituted musical performance as a constant feature of public events. Information gathered from church records, newspaper postings and family members, along with an examination of the guitar itself, bear out the community-building implications of a particular musical instrument on an otherwise financially-compromised rural region.
The Breakdown of Indiana’s Excess Liability Trust Fund (ELTF) System. What Went Right and What Went Wrong
Richard J. Lenz, Creek Run LLC Environmental Engineering, Montpelier, Indiana,
Indiana, prior to 2017, established itself as a leader in environmental due diligence. Following regulatory guidelines established in 1986 Indiana established a state regulatory authority led by environmental professionals. The Underground Storage Tank (UST) division within the program was established and a fund was created to aide UST owners with the appropriate abatement and remediation after the removal of UST storage tanks. The fund was established with a gas tax placed upon the retail sale, initially, of only gasoline, not diesel. The attended purpose of the program was widely underutilized for many years allowing for a large surplus to be established. However, once access to the fund by environmental consultants became marketing tool environmental due diligence escalated, in a positive way to help abate spills and leaks from petroleum UST. Success led in some cases to greed, and by 2017 Indiana led the nation in the cost of an environmental cleanup of a release from a UST. It is evident that over the last decade fraud waste and abuse of the fund has become rampant. Regulators either could not and in some cases would not take fiduciary responsibility in managing the fund. Now the state ELTF has dwindling resources and access is being limited as new regulatory leadership attempts to react to the situation and seeks out help from the state legislature.
Mid-Century Modern in Ann Arbor
Ryan McGowan, Historic Preservation Program, Eastern Michigan University
This paper discusses the influences of high style mid-century modern design forms in the neighborhoods on the west side of Ann Arbor. A unique confluence of a post war industrial boom and a local university provided a boon of creativity in design, allowing the seemly middle to working class ranch homes in west Ann Arbor to display some high style features of the time. These homes laid the foundation for the trendy, artistic Ann Arbor community image in the 20th century. The unique influences of Emil Lorch’s pure design focus at the University of Michigan architecture program show themselves in several of the well documented Robert Metcalf homes in Ann Arbor, as well as in the vernacular mid-century housing stock in the period appropriate suburbs of Ann Arbor.
This paper also sheds light on the high style focus of mid-century documentation in Ann Arbor while the mid-century vernacular housing lacks a cohesive documentation that captures the significance of these neighborhoods in the context of cultural and architectural tastes during the time when they were first built. Several of these neighborhoods are in the process of changing ownership to 21st century families and another wave of remodeling and addition building is beginning to crop up in the neighborhoods. Now more than before, a cohesive documentation of morphological features relating to these homes place in context needs to occur before the transformation reduces the number of examples available for study.
Hopefully this paper will generate some attention by preservationists and other professionals toward the mid-century vernacular housing in Ann Arbor as a supporting cultural artifact in the wider scope of Michigan’s contribution to mid-century design.
From Old West to Cosmopolitan: Changing Narratives of Oklahoma City Tourist Guides
Adam Payne, Auburn University
Tourist guides have long been used to sell regions and attractions to perspective tourists. Narratives in these guides often shift to reflect the changing economics, politics, and culture of a region or city. More recently, the rise of entrepreneurial urbanism has been one of those factors that has impacted tourist guides. The (re)construction of a place image through entrepreneurial policies results in the promotion of a select package of facilities or highlighting specific attributes associated with that place, while often marginalizing unwanted elements. This study focuses on Oklahoma City, a mid-sized American city, and explores the relationship between tourist guides and entrepreneurial urbanism. Using thirty-eight years of Oklahoma City tourist guides, this study traces the changing narratives of the city as elements of entrepreneurial urbanism begin to impact the city. This form of urban governance in Oklahoma City shifts narratives from overtly Old West constructs to increasingly cosmopolitan ones.
The Gellert Trunk: A Hartmann Cushion Top Wardrobe Trunk
Jen Peters, Eastern Michigan University and Troy Historic Village
Travel and tourism have changed dramatically in the last 100 years…or have they? A detailed analysis of a 1927 Hartmann Wardrobe Trunk reveals information not just about the construction and manufacture of the item, but also about sales, purchase, and functionality. This particular trunk, purchased and used by a doctor from Detroit in the 1920s and 30s, becomes a window into travel and tourism in the early 20th century. By using a range of research tools and methods, from patent research to genealogical records and city directories, a seemingly simple trunk opens a multitude of questions and insights into travel history and travel today.
Striking out for Coal: Discourses on Labor Conflict at the National Mining Museums of Great Britain
William R. Price, Ball State University
The coal miners of Great Britain were long synonymous with the labor movement. At the peak of membership in the early twentieth century, the Miner’s Federation of Great Britain had nearly one million members across the island. Though much changed in the aftermath of nationalization following WWII, the National Union of Miners (NUM) continued to wield considerable influence, leading strikes and other labor activities that had significant impacts on British politics. Consequently, coal miners were among the most prominent targets of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the conservative party’s anti-union efforts in the 1980s. The 1984-1985 Strike turned into a pivotal moment in the history of British unionism, with images broadcast around the world of often-violent clashes between strike supporters and the government. With the efforts of the NUM ending in defeat, the strike would effectively lead to the end of coal mining in Great Britain and a weakening of wider unionism in the country. This paper explores the representation of strikes and other union activities at the National Coal Mining Museums of Wales, England, and Scotland. Based on a discourse analysis of interpretive material at the sites, the research emphasizes similarities and differences in the national museums’ representation of the causes of coal union and government conflict, motivations of stakeholders, manifestations of violence, and consequences for the coal industry, culture, and landscape.
Dancing around the Subject: Museum Landscapes of Post-Industrial Environmental Crises
Mark Alan Rhodes II, Michigan Technological University
As the newest of the seven national museums in Wales, the National Waterfront Museum tells the story of Welsh industry and innovation. Broken into fifteen galleries, the Waterfront engages visitors with the material and digital collections and narratives of industrialization – and deindustrialization – in Wales. This paper focuses on two of those galleries, Landscapes and Energy, in a detailed analysis of memory work. The museum may have created the materialized discourse surrounding environmental exploitation and disaster, particularly the relationship between this environmental violence and the heavy industries of South Wales, but how do visitors actually experience and engage with these narratives? As the newest museum, the space also complements over two hundred events annually, further enriching an already complex historical and cultural landscape. Beyond tracing the museums narratives alongside visitor experience around environmental impacts, I also bring in the possibility of museum events’ abilities to fill gaps perhaps left in the visitor experience. Swansea’s 2017 Dance Days, for example, focused around the theme of climate change and the vulnerability of the ocean. Visitors were somewhat less engaged in the environmental scars left on the landscapes and societies of Wales and the world, post-industrialization, in the permanent collections of the museum. However, this paper expands beyond a typical understanding of museum discourse to explore how the incorporation of dance offers an additional – all-be-it ephemeral – layer to the cultural and historic landscape of the National Waterfront Museum.
Antecedent Landscapes and Las Vegas Casinos: Exploring Place through a Referential Perspective
Rex J. Rowley, Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment, Illinois State University
Las Vegas has long been seen as a place from which cultural scholars can learn about the rest of America. Now that gambling is legal in almost every corner of the country, we can literally see evidence of Las Vegas everywhere we go. Even within the everyday, local spaces in Las Vegas, evidence abounds of the influence of the Strip and what it symbolizes. I look to the cultural landscape, and promote the idea of antecedent landscapes, in order to explore a sense of place that simultaneously influences and is influenced by Las Vegas casinos. I describe the following ways that place is constructed through the influence of antecedent landscapes: A direct reference to the Las Vegas Strip in everyday landscapes and locals casinos illustrates a blurred, complicated, and tethered connection between the tourist’s Las Vegas and that of the local; antecedent suburban landscapes that influence locals casinos in Las Vegas suburbs illustrate a pattern of emplacement of a casino within a neighborhood, further strengthening that place-based bond between “Vegas” and everyday life and promoting the casino complex as a sort of community hub; and casinos across the United States—taking their cues from Las Vegas—illustrate a national sense of place and identity undergoing changes in the last three decades.
Landscape as (national) Archive
Richard H. Schein, University of Kentucky
This paper: draws upon the utility of thinking about landscape-as-method; is predicated on the idea that landscapes “work;” and is grounded in a normative commitment to justice, equity and equality in and through landscape. More specifically, the landscape as tangible, visible scene entails American national experiences not always documented elsewhere. The landscape thus materializes and mediates other stories of American life. The consonance between this perspective and ideas drawn from archival studies will be explicated through examples that variously work: to bring the margins to representation; to offer the landscape-as-archive as a relational ontology of American experience; to challenge hegemonic narratives of American nationalism.
Emergent Technologies for Historic Preservation and Cultural Tourism: Using Artificial Intelligence to Analyze and Predict Human Engagement with Historic Sites
Christa Smith, Clemson University
New technologies such as 360 photo, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are bringing unprecedented potential improvements and additions to the fields of historic preservation and cultural tourism. Currently, Google has partnered with 3D laser scanning nonprofit CyArk to “help preserve historical sites around the world that are at risk of irreversible damage or total erasure due to human conflict and natural disasters.” Microsoft recently embarked on a two year effort to use AI to help preserve facets of cultural heritage such as endangered languages. While such efforts should be applauded, these technologies are used primarily for capturing and storing virtual realities for future generations or other more passive data sets. Very little has been published on how machine learning and artificial intelligence can be used to gain better insights in our understanding of actual human interaction (or lack of interaction) with historic and cultural sites or artifacts. For example, the struggle over historic monuments in the South has been well documented, but there is scare information on who daily interacts with such structures or what that level of engagement entails. A more critical understanding of visitor participation is needed to interpret these growing controversies and the use of AI could aid tremendously in that effort. This paper discusses how AI can be used to analyze and predict human engagement with historic sites and monuments.
Antique Postcards and the Privatization of Urban Landscapes
Tyler Sonnichsen, Central Michigan University
Between 1932 and 1944, a travelling salesman and erstwhile Jazz musician who went by the name Ben Irving mailed over 1,000 postcards home to his family in Brooklyn from hundreds of places throughout North America. In 2014, his great-grandson (me) underwent an elaborate process of cataloging these postcards, beginning a long-term project of seeking out the locations depicted and, where possible, recreating the images.
In the 21st century, many American cities, especially those in the Rust Belt region, have sought to recentralize their populations that fled and/or sprawled as they deindustrialized in the second half of the 20th. However, these visions are too often based upon a retroactive utopianism and less a critical embrace of pre-War commodification of place. As personal cameras were a luxury item at the time, postcard images were likely the only detailed depictions that the recipients ever saw of these towns, especially the smaller ones of “Middle America.”
Unfortunately, as American cities have become increasingly privatized and militarized, access to these sites has often been negotiated through security guards, electronic surveillance, and looming trespassing charges. While geographers like Bradley Garrett have earned notoriety for “‘place-hacking’ the city” and called attention to obstacles the neoliberal city model has created for urban mobility, less attention has been paid to the uses of vintage imagery and rephotography to highlight these dynamics. This research asks what about palimpsest urban landscapes we can learn from pre-War postcards, and how they might form a cautionary tale about the signposts of revanchist urbanism.
‘Free Colored’ Midwestern-Southern Pioneer Travelers: Mapping James Roberts’s 1830 Letter and the Shepard Family 1850s Correspondence
Jennifer Stinson, Department of History, Saginaw Valley State University
A century before Victor Hugo Green first published his eponymous “Negro” travel guide, James Roberts stayed up half the night penning a letter to his cousin Willis. James was appalled that Willis planned to return from his new Indiana farm to his old North Carolina home. There, his free-born children risked “com[ing] under the hands of some cruel slaveholder” and free “colored” men like Willis “could not speak for their rights.” But if Willis’s family did go back, James wanted them to travel safely. He closed his letter with a list of forty-five villages and a few cities in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia through which the family should go. In 1852, Caroline Shepard and her male relatives began a correspondence, from their Wisconsin home, with their kin 900 miles away in the Virginia Piedmont. They all hoped to meet again, but it took Caroline seventeen years to realize that dream, just before her death, in 1869.
With such experiences as its starting point, this presentation explores midwesterners’ motives for southward travel, the realities of such journeys, and the strategies they used to navigate their way through free but not necessarily friendly territory back to their homelands. Desires to reconnect with or to aid kinfolk or renew ties in old age took center stage as free midwesterners of color contemplated southward journeys. The communities through which they passed illustrate the shear diversity of settlements in which free people of color lived in the Midwest. Some locales, like Dayton, Ohio, had 130 residents of color from whom to seek food and lodging, while others, like Rushville, Ohio, had just six. Some places, like Xenia, Ohio, offered travelers of color such as Roberts the chance to seek hospitality from kinfolk or from unrelated families whose status resembled his own: they lived and farmed independently. But others, like Centerville, Ohio, forced travelers to reckon with the plight of servants of color who lived and worked within white homes and businesses.
This presentation’s analysis uses census data; antebellum travel and pass laws; nineteenth-century histories from the communities through which people of color travelled; and letters from the Library of Congress’s Roberts Family Collection and from the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Shepard Family Collection. It represents the first step in creating a digital exhibition on migration of antebellum midwesterners of color. It elaborates upon recent scholarship to illuminate fundamental truths concerning antebellum freepeoples’ migration. Existing literature shows the struggles the Midwest’s free African diaspora faced during settlement after they arrived in the region. Other studies examine antebellum “colored” travel in the nineteenth-century Northeast or in later eras.But, as this presentation demonstrates, people of color also faced complications and perils en route to midwestern destinations. Overall, the presentation advances understanding of migration as a right of citizenship—a right that, in the face of many impediments, free people strategized to pursue with safety and dignity.
Preserving the Built Environment via Adaptive Reuse: The Vinsetta Garage
Cassandra Talley, Eastern Michigan University
As buildings grow old there is a common belief among many people outside the historic preservation community that these buildings are increasingly useless as they continue to age. Despite the continuing structural integrity of the building, and with ubiquitous television shows and online marketing campaigns promoting an ever-changing stream of design fads, consumers are encouraged to continually gut and renovate their homes. In this consumer-fickle climate it is increasingly important that historic buildings be targeted for re-use if they are to be saved at all.
But what constitutes a “good” adaptive reuse project? In surveying the local building stock are there certain projects that come to mind as good examples: the Vinsetta Garage in Berkley, Michigan is just such an example.
The Vinsetta Garage is a notable example of excellence even if the new use is a little incongruous: a restaurant is not the first re-use option that comes to mind when contemplating a derelict auto repair shop. But, because the owners took such care in preserving the history, the finished product blends the two purposes, old and new, very harmoniously: while eating your paper-wrapped burger, presented on an industrial metal tray, it feels inevitable—of course a garage can function as a restaurant, why not? This paper explores a prime example of how a building can change, even in a radical way, to suit a new purpose.
Landscape Persistence in New Orleans’ Lower 9
Samuel Wallace, Associate Professor of Geography, Montgomery County Community College
Despite the devastating effects of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and levee breaches on the human population of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) shows minimal change in land cover classification between 2004 and 2006. Indeed, the land cover classifications from 2001 through 2016 remain largely unchanged, showing small increases in intensity of land use. The human population is more quickly changeable than the built landscape and the human population seeks to maintain our landscapes.
If this persistence of landscape exists in these devastated tracts, what are the implications for the impacts of greening and re-forestation projects on the over-all landscape in Detroit and other cities? Will urban agriculture and pocket parks have any measurable impact on federal land cover classifications?
Agritourism in Colorado’s Grand Valley
Jeffrey Widener, Director Center for Spatial Analysis, Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability, University of Oklahoma
Colorado’s upper Grand Valley is a tiny example of the modern American West. This region has experienced it all—the phasing out and in of the Old West, booms, busts, droughts, recessions, and the phasing in, as a High Country News reporter termed it, the “new” New West. Farmers in the upper Grand Valley have a formula for conserving farmland and for preserving their way of life—via technological improvements in irrigation, land trusts and conservation easements, and through agritourism. Agritourism is blooming across the US, and, in the American West, farmers are seeing this activity as a valuable enterprise. The economic importance is a given. But, perhaps just as important is that agritourism activities educate those who partake in them. This paper, based on over three years of archival and field research, showcases how farmers in this precious region have preserved their way of life, their landscapes, and their industry for posterity amid the chaos of changes taking place around them—amenity migration, exurbanization, rural gentrification, and natural resource development—by exploring the theme of agritourism and its associated landscape changes.
The Foiba di Basovizza: A “Quasi-Agent” that Manipulates History, Politics, Power, and People
Louise Zamparutti, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
The Foiba di Basovizza in northeast Italy, designated an Italian national monument in 2007, commemorates victims of killings instigated by Yugoslavian communist partisans at the end of World War II. Despite evidence that they were politically motivated and that the majority of victims were from the former Yugoslavia, the monument describes the killings as the “ethnic cleansing” of Italians by “Slavs.” My paper argues that this monument, situated less than three kilometers from the Slovenian border, claims the culturally hybrid and historically contested area as exclusively Italian ground, recasts Fascists as martyrs, and bolsters existing power structures in Italy. I show how it reinvents the landscape physically, by overshadowing nearby monuments to Slovene antifascists, and rhetorically, by enacting a narrative of exclusive Italian victimhood and constructing a singular understanding of Italian identity.
Existing scholarship on the Basovizza monument challenges its validity by questioning its historical accuracy and analyzing it as a reflection of right-wing political discourse. My paper, however, develops Endres and Senda-Cook’s assertion that “places, imbued with meaning and consequences, are rhetorical performances” and Bennet’s description of the capacity of objects to “act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” Rather than existing as a static representation of its human creators’ ideology, I argue that the monument is an agential object whose performativity is enacted through ongoing interactions with it. Synthesizing theory and methodology from the field of rhetoric, I show how the monument’s materiality, the geographical, historical, and political context, and the monument’s many observers, critics, and supporters enact a narrative that strives to dominate historiography. I propose that my analysis has relevance to many current global situations in which monuments, audiences, and landscapes interact in negotiating the locus of power.