Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape. Ed. by Paul A. Shackel. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xiv, 286 pp. $59.95, isbn 0-8130-2104-9.)

Abstract

Interpretations of the past are shaped by what our nation-state chooses to remember and acknowledge. As the recent uproar over Philadelphia's Liberty Bell site or the Lincoln statue dedication in Richmond, Virginia, suggests, scholars, special interest groups, politicians, government officials, and the public continue to wrangle over the production of history at American battlefields, memorials, and historic sites. The stakes are undeniably high. “Those who control the past,” Paul A. Shackel observes in his preface to this volume of essays, “have the ability to command social and political events in the present and the future” (p. 3). The book's twelve contributors take on the “contested landscape of American national memory” (p. xi) in case studies loosely organized around three overlapping themes introduced by Shackel—the exclusionary past, the patriotic past, and American heritage tourism. The essays contemplate preservation policies and interpretive practice at historic sites ranging from the Antietam battlefield and Baltimore's sports center at Camden Yards to the carriage trails that John D. Rockefeller Jr. fixed on Mount Desert Island, now Acadia National Park, near his Maine summer home. College students particularly will find this collection a welcome and fairly comprehensive introduction to a critical aspect of public history.