AMERICAN PLACES: Encounters with History.

AuthorKellman, Steven G.
PositionReview

AMERICAN PLACES: Encounters with History EDITED BY WILLIAM E. LEUOHTENBURG OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2000, 544 PAGES, $30.00

If, as John Milton's Satan contends, "The mind is its own place," it is also true that each place has its own mind, a distinctive spirit that harbors unique memories and ambitions. Otherwise, why would anyone ever travel, or refuse even to budge? It is to comprehend and celebrate the genius of locale that William E. Leuchtenburg, a renowned scholar of the New Deal, invited 27 other historians to contribute to American Places. Blending personal anecdotes with historical information, each essay is a meditation on a site that its author finds particularly meaningful. The entire collection is vivid testimony to the power of place in American collective memory.

One of the pieces in American Places stretches the definition of "American"; another of "place" Nevertheless, in writing about the cemetery at Omaha Beach in Normandy, James C. Cobb makes a compelling case for how that European scene of wartime carnage has become a sacred space in American history. Meanwhile, parsing out the implications of the metaphor "cyberspace" Edward L. Ayer examines how the Internet has become largely American terrain.

Two of the essayists write about baseball fields--John Demos on Boston's Fenway Park and Jules Tygiel on New York's no longer standing Polo Grounds. Since so many of the contributors are professors, it is not surprising that two write about college campuses--Carl N. Degler on Vassar and Sean Wilentz on Princeton's Nassau Hall. Two others write about streets: Pondering...

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