| Edition |
1st Touchstone ed. |
| Description |
480 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
|
text txt rdacontent |
|
unmediated n rdamedia |
|
volume nc rdacarrier |
| Note |
"A Touchstone book." |
|
Originally published: New York : New Press, 1999. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
In What Ways Were We Warped? -- Some Functions of Public History -- The Sociology of Historic Sites -- Historic Sites Are Always a Tale of Two Eras -- Hieratic Scale in Historic Monuments -- The Far West. Alaska Denali (Mt. McKinley): The Tallest Mountain -- The Silliest Naming ; Hawaii Honolulu: King Kamehameha I, The Roman! ; California Sacramento: The Flat Earth Myth on the West Coast ; California Sacramento: Exploiting vs. Exterminating the Natives ; California San Francisco: China Beach Leaves Out the Bad Parts ; California Downieville: Killing a Man Is Not News ; Oregon La Grande: Don't "Discover" 'Til You See the Eyes of the Whites! ; Washington Cowlitz County: No Communists Here! ; Washington Centralia: Using Nationalism to Redefine a Troublesome Statue ; Nevada Hickison Summit: What We Know and What We Don't Know About Rock Art ; Nevada Nye County: Don't Criticize Big Brother. |
| Summary |
"Offers startling revelations about sites we think we know; Valley Forge, Abraham Lincoln's log cabin, the Intrepid. It also tells of new sites, events, and individuals that should be commemorated on the landscape but aren't; a tombstone with a story to tell in Mississippi, a spy in the confederate White House, the unforeseen fallout from the first nuclear missile test, the reverse underground railway, a modern "sundown" town (blacks can work there, but they'd better leave before the sun sets). It asks why, across our landscape, Indians are consistently "savage", tribal names are wrong and derogatory, whites "discover" everything, and the term "massacre" is a one-way street; why war museums have selective memories, guides at FDR's family mansion in Hyde park are "specifically forbidden" to talk about Roosevelt's mistresses, and James Buchanan's house denies that he was gay. It muses about the Civil War mare in Kentucky who got an extra body part, the Polynesian King made to look like a Roman emperor on monuments in Hawaii, and the statue of a conquistador in New Mexico who lost his foot." |
| Subject |
Historic sites -- United States.
|
|
Monuments -- United States.
|
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United States -- History -- Errors, inventions, etc.
|
|
Historic sites. (OCoLC)fst00957846
|
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Monuments. (OCoLC)fst01025892
|
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United States. (OCoLC)fst01204155
|
| Genre/Form |
History. (OCoLC)fst01411628
|
| ISBN |
0684870673 (pbk.) |
|
9780684870670 (pbk.) |
|
9780743296298 |
|
074329629X |
|
