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318 pp, 25 photos, 1995
$21.00 paper, 0-87745-518-X, 978-0-87745-518-9
“This book is a timely and welcome addition to the literature on place and American culture.”—Geographical Review
“Mapping American Culture is a useful contribution to [the] ongoing discovery of America in all the diversity of its people and places.”—Journal of American History
“Publishing papers from an interdisciplinary conference in book form is always a gamble. Too often the resulting essays are disparate, uneven, and seem merely forced together in an unhappy proximity which is merely adventitious. However, when the gamble works, the results can be exceptionally fruitful and exhilarating. This volume is a successful case in point. Franklin and Steiner's collection of essays written by geographers, art and literary critics . . . constitutes a fine and wide-ranging introduction to recent, promising developments in American cultural geography. The standards of writing, engagement, and insight in the collection are uniformly high.”—Journal of American Studies
What connections can be drawn between oral history and the shopping mall? Gospel music and the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant? William Carlos Williams's Patterson and the Manhattan Project's secret cities? The answers lie in this insightful collection of essays that read and illuminate the American landscape. Through literature and folklore, music and oral history, autobiography, architecture, and photography, eleven leading writers and thinkers explore the dialectic between space and place in modern American life. The result is an eloquent and provocative reminder of the environmental context of events—the deceptively simple fact that events “take place.”
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