Paper Abstracts
The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Landscape, Place, and Memory in a Midwestern Town
Timothy G. Anderson – Ohio University
For many Americans, the physical and cultural landscapes of the Midwest evoke a set of iconic images and tropes that over time became synonymous with the region in American popular culture: fertility; frugality; authenticity; self-reliance; social and political conservatism. Such imagery is irrevocably linked to the country’s rural, agricultural past and a suite of associated nostalgic cultural narratives. In our scontemporary “culture wars,” these Main Street idea(l)s are juxtaposed with new attitudes stemming from – and anchored in – bicoastal narratives in which values such as progressiveness, progress, inclusivity, diversity, and plurality are forwarded as a set of superior “American” standards. Informed by field observation and viewed through the lens of contemporary theory related to the analysis of memorial and commemorative landscapes, this essay identifies and discusses themes associated with the Midwest and nostalgia for an idealized rural past in the cultural landscapes of a prairie farming town in northwest Oklahoma. This analysis is undergirded by the premise that social and political discourses are encoded in any given cultural landscape and materialized in its tangible features. In his recent book Fantasyland, Kurt Andersen contends that the American world-view is in part shaped by a “nostalgic cultural gaze” through which national cultural ideals are (re)created. Likewise, in Retromania, Simon Reynolds describes Americans as a people “obsessed with the cultural artifacts of [their] own immediate past.” Here, I argue that an aching nostalgia for an idealized pastoral past is commonly manifested in the cultural landscapes of towns in the American “heartland,” and that this theme is dominant in the region’s memorial and commemorative landscapes. I end with a discussion of how such nostalgia – based in and stemming from the Midwest – figures prominently in the nation’s contemporary political and social discourses.
The Changing Story of America Through the Lens of Postage Stamps: Still Patriotic, But More Environmentally Aware, Colorful, and Whimsical
Thomas L. Bell – University of Tennessee
In 1957, the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee (CSAC) was created. This body of experts recommended to the Postmaster General the relatively few stamps to be issued from among the myriad topics suggested for commemoration by the public. As a youngster, collecting US commemorative stamps provided me with a story of America that was progressive, patriotic, outward looking, and optimistic, albeit a bit bland. Would a similar young person collecting US commemoratives fifty years later discover a similar story? Despite the more than four-fold increase in the number of stamps issued in similar four-year periods separated by fifty years, the answer to that question is ‘yes.’ But the ‘contemporary’ stamps are more attractive than their ‘historic’ counterparts. Two major factors account for this change: 1) different printing techniques allow for greater variation in stamp design, colors, and ways of displaying multiple examples of a theme on a single issue. Some of these modern techniques border on gimmickry; and 2) the dual mission of the United States Postal Service (USPS) created in 1971. The USPS is charged both to provide an efficient communication delivery service and to enhance revenue through the sale of stamp products. Thus, many ‘contemporary’ stamps pander for sales by including cartoon characters, focusing on popular culture icons and popular collector topics. I argue that such popular stamps may attract a newer, younger audience to the hobby of stamp collecting. More importantly for the story of America, many ‘contemporary’ stamps issued as part of a designated series, are just as patriotic as stamps of the ‘historic’ period and are more inclusive of groups and topics that had heretofore been underrepresented. Additionally, ‘contemporary’ stamps focus a great deal more on the environment than their ‘historic’ counterparts dealing with topics such as endangered flora and fauna and ecological habitats.
Keywords: Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee (CSAC), Commemoration, Popular Culture, Postage Stamps, United States Postal Service (USPS)
Chicken Tenders, Sauerkraut Balls, & Whoopie Pies: Regional Food Identities in Minor League Baseball
Ethan Bottone – Northwest Missouri State University
Over the last decade, there has been an increasing trend in Minor League Baseball (MiLB) for teams to temporarily change their names to a new identity that the team assumes. Alternate identities serve several purposes for the teams that adopt them, including expanding merchandise sales and attendance, while also potentially broadening team appeal to new markets. These identities take a range of forms, from new animal mascots to pun-based names, but a popular inspiration for a number of teams is regional foodscapes. These regional food-based names help reinforce the connection to the local community that MiLB teams must cultivate to survive, while also increasing awareness of unique cultural practices to a wider audience. This trend has created an intriguing material cultural situation: In a world of globalization and cultural convergence, these alternate identities support regional heterogeneity and shine a light on the distinctive material cultures found across the United States. This paper begins to explore this relationship through examples of this trend and seeks to develop a better understanding of how distinctive regional cultures may create new materialities and foodscapes in a changing world.
Material Culture in a National Heritage Area
Dawn S. Bowen – University of Mary Washington
The Atchafalaya National Heritage Area was established in 2006. Its mission is to “enhance the identity of [a] unique American landscape by preserving and promoting … heritage.” In keeping with this year’s conference theme, this paper examines landscapes of identity in Cajun Louisiana. In October, 2023, and January, 2024, I visited this region to explore the visible landscape of this unique cultural group. Museums tell a story of early settlement and occupation of the region, highlighting the contributions of a distinct culture. Everywhere there are literal billboards of Cajun this and Cajun that on the landscape, but little tangible evidence of a built environment associated with a Cajun folk culture. While there is no question that one finds herself in a distinct place, but it is an experience that is clouded. This presentation draws attention to the tourist experience within the region and shares the perspective of a geographer being unable to read a cultural landscape.
Pardon the Interruption, U.S. Route 2
Wayne Brew – Montgomery County Community College
U.S. Route 2, the northern-most east-west U.S. interstate highway, runs from Houlton, Maine at the Canadian border and ends just east of Rouses Point, New York. The gap (interruption) to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan was part of the original plan with the road continuing from Sault Sainte Marie to Bonners Ferry, Idaho. In 1946 Route 2 was extended to Everett, Washington for a total of over 2,500 miles. In 2017 I traced the entirety of Route 2. This illustrated presentation will cover the weird and wonderful commercial architecture, signs, food (pasties), and landscape of Route 2. Be prepared to see a fish restaurant where the patrons are the bait and the geographic center of North America.
Roadside Shrines Among Arizona’s Tohono O’odham
John A. Cross – University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
The presence of roadside crosses, wreaths, nichos, and decorative stones has long been noticed in Arizona and New Mexico, where they are associated with Hispanic and certain Native American populations. This paper builds upon earlier works of geographers, anthropologists, and historians describing the abundance of such shrines in the region of the Tohono O’odham, formerly called the Papago Indians, who occupy part of southern Arizona and adjacent northern Sonora.
The main objective of this study is to categorize and describe the memorials or descansos located along Arizona Highway 86 and Arizona Indian Highway 15 within the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation, drawing upon observations of 81 sites visited in late October, during 2018, 2022, and 2023. Given that many of the sites were visited at least twice, longitudinal changes in the variety and types of decorations were observed. In addition, the study sought to note the role of Halloween (or Day of the Dead) decorations within some of the shrines.
The roadside shrines were categorized considering their display of a cross, nicho, wreath, platform, or ramada. While the display of a cross was virtually universal, within many of the shrines it was the most prominent feature, while within others the cross was a much smaller feature atop or alongside a nicho or ramada. In others, the cross and nicho were equally prominent. Wreaths were often displayed on the crosses. The shrine was sometimes placed on a low platform, while rows of painted rocks, or rocks of uniform natural color, surrounded some of the shrines. A wide variety of objects, including religious statues and figurines, candles, colored glass pebbles, and stuffed animals, among others, were displayed around some of the shrines, while others featured simply a cross or a cross with a wreath.
Creating Bivouacs for the Dead: Rural Cemeteries, Burial Politics, and the American Civil War
Joy M. Giguere – Penn State York
The years encompassing the Civil War and Reconstruction proved to be a transformative era for the rural cemetery in America. Those established from the 1830s through the 1850s reflected new developments in taste and aesthetics even as they also responded to the extraordinary needs of society in the face of so much loss of life in four short and devastating years of military conflict. Not only did the nation’s rural cemeteries in both North and South become repositories for the soldier dead, they reflected the major social and political developments that took shape during this time. During the war, rural cemetery managers throughout the country set aside space in their burying grounds for the burial of the soldier dead either out of necessity, as in the case of the South, or as acts of patriotism, as was the trend in the North. In a number of cases, those wartime lots designated strictly for the burial of the Union dead later became national cemeteries, connected to their original host rural cemetery but managed by the federal government. Beginning in 1868, local posts of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) along with members of the community ventured out to decorate the soldiers’ graves on Memorial Day. Further, rural cemeteries across the Confederate and loyal border South established lots for the burial and postwar reburials of the Confederate dead. These spaces, separate from the national cemeteries, continued to be cared for by the rural cemeteries, with the individual burials decorated annually in Confederate Decoration Day ceremonies organized by southern Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMAs) beginning in 1866.
Because so many Union and Confederate soldiers shared burial space within the same rural cemeteries, these burying grounds ultimately became highly contested performative spaces in which civilians, through their care for and decoration of graves, exhibited their loyalty to one side or the other. The city of the dead, which before the Civil War had been regarded as an apolitical, if not an entirely uncontested social space, through war became politicized and contested. Especially in border states such as Kentucky and Maryland, where sympathies were deeply divided, outward shows of loyalty – especially to the Confederacy – illustrated the extent to which civilians were willing to rebuff federal and military dictates against supporting the southern rebellion. Across the nation, regardless of locality, the presence of the war’s dead and the erection of large monuments in the rural cemeteries further enhanced and entrenched community identities, especially with regard to the white South’s embrace of the mythology of the Lost Cause. Fundamental to the postwar fashioning of how communities regarded themselves within the wartime narrative and how they envisioned their place as they moved forward in a postwar, post-emancipation landscape, rural cemeteries across the nation ultimately became central locales for the formation and performance of the public history and memory of the Civil War. No longer strictly “pleasure grounds of death,” rural cemeteries transformed into politicized landscapes where the cultural battles over public memory continue to be waged even in the 21st century.
When Softballs were Cannonballs in Cincinnati: The Golden Age of Men’s Fast-Pitch Softball
Margaret M. Gripshover – Western Kentucky University
Today, fast-pitch softball is most often played by women, but, during the first half of the 20th century, men’s teams dominated the sport. First known as “kittenball” or “playground ball,” by the 1920s, men’s softball leagues were popping up in midwestern cities such as Minneapolis and Chicago. Softball had several advantages over baseball as an inner-city sport. Softball fields required less space than baseball fields and was often played on vacant lots. Softball allowed for more players to participate and required less equipment. By the early 1930s, softball was a wildly popular men’s amateur sport in the Cincinnati area. Teams were frequently sponsored by locally owned businesses such as grocery stores and taverns. Many of the so-called “amateur” softball players were, in fact, well-paid for their services. During the 1930s, one player, pitcher Sidney “Cannonball” Bailey, earned more than some members of the Cincinnati Reds. Bailey was so effective on the mound that he changed the landscape of the softball field. To give hitters a better chance to handle Cannonball’s offerings, the mound was moved back from 35 feet to 37 feet, and then even further to its current standard of 42 feet. Participation in men’s softball leagues in the Cincinnati area peaked in the late 1930s. The post-World War II period all but erased men’s softball from the landscape. By the 1950s, the stars of the 1930s like Bailey, were no longer playing, and younger men were not drawn to the sport. Urban recreational landscapes changed, employment and family patterns shifted, and grassroots sponsors such as corner taverns faded away. Local fans shifted their leisure time habits watching televised professional sports. Today, men’s fast-pitch softball has all but vanished from the landscape. The last professional league folded in 1982.
Keywords: Cincinnati, fast-pitch softball, sports landscapes, urban recreation
Between Marginality and Privilege: Galician Symbols in the Urban Fabric of Buenos Aires
Kathryn L. Hannum – Michigan Technological University
This paper examines the role of Galician immigrants in shaping both the physical and symbolic landscape of Buenos Aires, Argentina. By analyzing Galician markers and performances, it explores how Galicians—one of the largest immigrant groups in Argentina—navigate their dual identity as both a marginalized ethnic group within Spain and a privileged part of Argentina’s European-centric national identity. Through examples of enduring urban symbols, public art, and cultural performances, the paper illustrates how Galician presence contributes to the complex urban narrative of Buenos Aires, a city that embodies tensions between white European identity and emergent discourses of diversity and inclusivity. The study highlights the strategic visibility of Galician symbology, which simultaneously reinforces the city's European character and participates in its shift towards a more inclusive image. Ultimately, the paper argues that the Galician identity in Buenos Aires serves to maintain both its minority status and its integration into Argentina’s larger narrative of European whiteness, providing insights into the role of ethnic identity in national and urban landscapes.
Public Memory in Your Pocket: Learning About America Through Coins and Currency
Seth T. Kannarr – University of Tennessee-Knoxville
If you reach deep into your pocket or purse, you just might find a piece of public memory ready to be spent and passed on to the next consumer. Ever since the United States Mint opened in Philadelphia in 1792, coinage with depictions of American figures, symbolic representations, and iconic inscriptions have circulated throughout the nation and world. The value and impact of these coins may be best reflected through the field of numismatics, although each of us plays an active role in using and viewing these engraved discs of metal alloys. Whether you are an avid coin collector or just looking to buy a candy bar at a convenience store, we are all complicit in the reproduction of American public memory. In this study I conducted a content analysis on all circulating coin programs produced since America’s bicentennial in 1976 to identify and explore what design features, places, and themes persist on our coinage. Results show a romanticization of American ideals through perennial symbolism and conflicting perspectives on America’s identity and how we should brand ourselves as a nation into the future.
In Their Own Words: The Skirmish of Castleton—July 6, 1777
Joseph E. Kinney – University of Massachusetts-Boston
The American Revolutionary War is of renewed interest to the American public in the 2020s as the semi-quincentennial anniversaries of key events from the war are soon approaching. In Castleton, Vermont, the anniversary of a forgotten revolutionary encounter is likewise forthcoming: a skirmish between Castleton militiamen and a British raiding party on July 6, 1777. While a pivotal event in Castleton’s brush with the war that led to the construction of Castleton’s “Fort Warren” in 1779, the famous and well-remembered Battle of Hubbardton raged the next morning just seven miles north, thereby casting a shadow on the event for the next two centuries. As such, the written history of the skirmish has been relegated to the margins and footnotes of historical works, usually in connection to articles about regional histories or the Battle of Hubbardton. Given the lack of a proper interpretation and the forthcoming 250th anniversary of the event, a contemporary study of the skirmish is warranted. In a place-based analysis with hereto unpublished primary accounts of the event, the “Skirmish of Castleton” is reexamined through the lens of the Castleton militiamen who defended the village on July 6, 1777, providing agency to previously unheard voices from the skirmish and revealing how the battleground changed the landscape and shaped Castleton’s deepening role in the American Revolutionary War.
Geographic Scale and Automobile Registration in the Early 20th Century United States
Jonathan Leib – Old Dominion University
The first two decades of the 20th century saw the growth of the automobile industry in the United States. As the use of motor vehicles grew, debate occurred over what was the correct geographic scale of governance to register and regulate automobiles. At the time, registration was scattered across state, county, and local governments, and it was not until 1918 when states became the main geographic scale for automobile registration and regulation in the U.S. However, in the two decades prior, there were debates and discussions focused on the U.S. Congress about creating a national registration system and at the state level over various state laws concerning automobile reciprocity; that is, whether and under what conditions a car registered in one state could be driven into another state.
The purpose of my larger research project is to examine these debates over scales of governance and regulating the automobile in the early 20th century. In this presentation, I present background context for this project by briefly outlining some of the different geographic scales of registration systems used around the United States in the early 20th century. This project fits into my long-standing interest in the ways that governments have used license plates to promote identity and political aims.
Differing Outcomes: An Exploration of Regional Approaches to the Historic Preservation of Small-Town, County Courthouses
Jordan McAlister – Oklahoma State University
Today about 66 percent of the 3,113 U.S. counties and equivalents have courthouses listed on the National Register of Historic Places. As one of the largest classes of the country's National Register-listed public buildings, historic county courthouses provide a dataset for comparing state historic preservation approaches. Despite their listings, each year many National Register-listed courthouses are altered to the extent that they could lose their National Register status. Since 2000, more than a dozen National Register-listed courthouses have simply been demolished. The implementation of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) is federally funded and carried out by each state's State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO). Recognizing this administrative divergence, this study employs a qualitative approach to examine six case studies of state and local preservation decision-making and outcomes in five states. The cases selected involve rural counties with National Register-listed courthouses requiring repairs substantial enough that state and local authorities were faced with decisions to raze/replace the buildings, historically rehabilitate them, or something in between. All were difficult state and local decisions that pitted pragmatic solutions against costly preservation options. Each also involved some local support of NHPA preservation goals to rehabilitate the courthouse in an historically appropriate manner. Each case details how public buildings are substantially connected with a sense of place, and how the successes and failures to protect them may produce lasting implications for communities. The empirical results allow the construction of three models of state-local interaction and decision-making to illustrate how certain conditions and approaches lead to expected preservation outcomes.
Keywords: courthouses, county seats, historic preservation, NHPA, SHPO, National Register of Historic Places, sense of place
Saving Indiana, Pennsylvania’s Historic Built Environment; A Comprehensive Approach to Determining What’s Worth Saving in Small Town America
Kevin Patrick – Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Indiana is the governmental seat of a rural western Pennsylvania county. With a population of about 14,000, it is a small town trying to position itself for a stable and prosperous future recognizing that significant economic, cultural, and societal changes have altered the paradigms that governed the town throughout the twentieth century. In an internet-based, post-industrial economy, traditional small towns with a heterogenous mix of historic built environments have become increasingly desirable places to live and visit. Preserving past landscapes is critical to the future health of these communities. By examining the historic built environments of Indiana and other towns, I have developed a comprehensive, place-based approach to interpreting small towns for the purpose of historic preservation and adaptive reuse. Historic assets important for the interpretation of commercial downtowns, traditional professional and merchant class residential neighborhoods, and traditional working-class neighborhoods may be hidden in plain sight. Revealing their potential can provide thematic strategies for preservation.
Vancouver’s Playland Pariahs: How Indigenous Exile (Literally) Paved the Way for Stanley Park
Alexandra M. Peck – University of British Columbia
This paper examines the complex Native history of Stanley Park, a popular tourist attraction and urban greenspace in Vancouver, Canada. Located in the Pacific Northwest, Stanley Park was home to the thriving intertribal village of Xwayxway (“Place of Masks”) for 3,000 years prior to European settlement. With the 19th century migration of newcomers to the region, the village transformed into a cross-cultural hub where people of Indigenous, Portuguese, and Chinese descent lived together—often forming alliances through marriage at this unique site. Deemed an impediment to settler colonial “progress,” these intercultural residents were violently ousted from their shoreline village during the late 1800s. Longhouses were burned or chopped down, burial sites desecrated, and shell middens pulverized to create the gravel that formed roadways for Vancouver’s first public park. City officials mapped out plans for an urban playland, complete with a mock “Indian” village (replacing the one that they had previously destroyed) and totem poles, in addition to a zoo, aquarium, and numerous other attractions. A select number of village residents resisted by continuing to live within the park, where they were labeled as a transient population whose presence threatened the general public’s safety. Despite efforts to divorce Indigenous individuals from their homeland—while fabricating a “new” exotic Native identity for the park—local Native communities continued to utilize the space and imbue it with meaning. Today, Stanley Park is a bustling gathering place where tourists and locals flock to admire the local scenery and city skyline. Its Indigenous history and sustained significance, however, remain veiled from public view.
Tom Petty’s Music and a Dialectic Regionalism
Chris W. Post – Kent State University
Tom Petty was a gifted songwriter in his solo work and with his three bands—the Heartbreakers, Mudcrutch, and the Travelling Wilburys. Through this work, Petty consistently wrote song lyrics reflective of his youth in the Deep South and his adulthood in Southern California. More than once, these regional identities crossed paths in the same song. This paper explores the “dialectic regionalism” of Petty’s music using compositions from two of Petty’s self-identified regionalist albums—the Heartbreakers’ Southern Accents (1985) and his solo Wildflowers (1994; performed mostly by the Heartbreakers). This paper particularly points out Petty’s abilities to illustrate these very different regions through his own experiences, sometimes in the same song as an expression of a more complex attachment with two oft-differentiated regions of the United States.
Keywords: place, Tom Petty, sense of place, regional identity, dialectic regionalism, music
Serial Industrial Cultural Landscape World Heritage Sites: Complex Geographies at Work within the Institutionalization of Industrial Heritage
Mark Alan Rhodes II – Michigan Technological University
With well over one thousand World Heritage Sites, UNESCO has increasingly incorporated complex geographies into their designated sites representing “outstanding universal significance”. Serial sites offer a disparate geography of non-contiguous borders in the demarcation of sites. The Cultural Landscape criteria reflect sites who “express a long and intimate relationship between peoples and their natural environment.” Meanwhile industrial heritage frames and negotiates the narratives of our industrial past in the present for the future. This paper highlights both the shifts in time across all World Heritage Sites towards incorporating more industrial heritage sites, while at the same time reflecting upon the complex geographies of serial designations within the Cultural Landscape Criteria. I specifically reflect upon the United States, whose heritage policy and broader contentious geopolitics shape an absence of both industrial heritage and cultural landscapes designated at a global scale. Stepping back from temporal, spatial, and policy patterns, I isolate case studies at this intersection in Europe, Asia, and Latin America to reflect upon the institutional frameworks deployed across these heritage institutions and how they negotiate environmental, economic, political, and cultural contestations. Overall, I isolate increasingly common, yet increasingly complex, patterns of space and scale within industrial World Heritage Sites.
Ethnicity, Redlining, and Urban Renewal in Manchester
Scott Roper – Vermont State University
Although early European settlers to Manchester, New Hampshire, tended to be Scottish-Irish, the city’s “immigrant” character only formed beginning in the 1840s with the arrival of Irish Catholics who were attracted by local construction and, later, factory employment with the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company. Subsequently, new groups to the city—Germans, French-Canadians, Belgians, and Swedish, Polish, Greek, and “Russian” (Lithuanian and Ukrainian) settlers—established their own communities throughout the city. Amoskeag controlled the city’s residential and commercial development through the sale of land, resulting in the development of ethnic neighborhoods.
After the Great Strike of 1922, Amoskeag’s interest in controlling Manchester’s development waned. This period saw the city embrace its new role in overseeing urban planning as it adopted Euclidian zoning. However, the threat of economic collapse after Amoskeag’s closure in 1936, the increased importance of the automobile, and ethnicity-based “redlining” created incentives to clear out specific portions of ethnic neighborhoods to promote economic development. The Housing Acts of 1949 and 1956 provided the funding for some of these projects in the 1950s and 1960s. The result was the destruction of ethnic neighborhoods, parks, and commercial buildings and districts in favor of strip malls, multi-story affordable housing units, small skyscrapers, access roads, and parking lots.
Exploring Manchester’s Lost Ethnic Landscapes
Stephanie Abbot Roper – Nashua Community College
This presentation explores ways that we can obtain information on past ethnicity in Manchester, New Hampshire, through the analysis of cultural landscapes. Although Manchester remains the state’s most ethnically diverse city, much of its ethnic history has been forgotten. However, remnants of this history still can be seen in landscape features such as street signs and place names, ethnic indicators in cemeteries, and the placement and diffusion of religious institutions over time. By interpreting these cultural indicators, one can reconstruct elements of this former mill city’s rich ethnic past and get a deeper understanding of the heritage of Manchester and New Hampshire.
Deep Maps and Microhistories: Reconstructing Daily Landscapes of French-Canadians in Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula
Sarah Fayen Scarlett – Michigan Technological University
As we consider the migration experiences of people in Manchester, this paper offers a comparable story about French-Canadians migrating to Michigan’s Keweenaw’s peninsula opting for industrial copper mining rather than New England’s textile factories. I represent preliminary results from ongoing research that is part of a 40-person Canadian partnership project called Three Centuries of Francophone Migration in North America 1640–1940. Working with colleagues and students in the Human Environment and Spatial Analytics Lab at Michigan Technological University, I work to reconstruct the domestic and employment landscapes of workers and their families in the copper mill town of Lake Linden with the aim of analyzing their social mobility between Quebec and Michigan.
Reconstructing built environment factors allows for the analysis of embodied movement on a small scale between home, work, and cultural centers, as well as comparative daily experiences on both sides of the Canadian border. Landscapes in Quebec were investigated through fieldwork and photography. Similar methods were used in Michigan along with a community-engaged deep map called the Keweenaw Time Traveler developed with colleagues at Michigan Tech which offers cartographic, demographic, and employment data for the entire region. This historical GIS tool allows me to piece together the landscapes in great detail over time including household and neighborhood factors along with work environments. Preliminary results seen in two microhistories presented in this paper provide rich views into the French-Canadian westward migration experience, which begins to offer researchers and descendent communities a clearer understanding of the migratory choices facing Quebec residents around the turn of the twentieth century.
Historic Preservation and New South Plantations: A Case Study
Christa Smith – Clemson University
Historic preservation scholars have written extensively on how to preserve and interpret difficult places, such as antebellum plantations in the America South. For example, recent and widespread criticism of hosting weddings and other celebrations at antebellum plantation houses/sites prompted the National Trust for Historic Preservation to host the “Plantation and Weddings Symposium.” The goal of this symposium was to introduce new strategies and solutions on how to ethically preserve and promote sites of enslavement. Practitioners are especially sensitive to preserving these places in a manner that does not promote Lost-Cause nostalgia, but rather presenting a realistic representation of all aspects of plantation life. Less visible among scholars and practitioners, however, is a consensus on how to preserve and interpret new plantation houses of the New South: those structures built between 1866-1929. I argue these post-Civil War plantations, in public memory at least, are viewed as less problematic because they are post-slavery; the land and structures of the new plantations did not represent spaces where enslaved peoples worked, suffered, and died. Instead, they represented a clean slate—a New South. While the notion that New South plantations were devoid of near slavery-like conditions is clearly a myth, the preservation efforts of post-Civil War plantations have yet to face the same push to ethically preserve like that of their antebellum counterparts. The interpretation and marketing of privately owned places in particular, (typically out of the control of professional preservationist) often adopt a nostalgic viewpoint in their preservation strategies that was once so common in past efforts of antebellum plantation mansions. This paper discusses one such New South plantation: the Hammond Plantation in upstate Anderson, South Carolina.
Keywords: Historic Preservation; New South; Plantations; Public Memory