AMERICAN PLACES: Encounters with History. - Review - book review

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 2001 by Steven G. Kellman

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 Washington, D.C's Pennsylvania Avenue, Paul Boiler Jr. reflects on the newly elected presidents who have marched along it in very different styles every four years, and Kenneth T. Jackson's discussion of Main Street in Memphis is the occasion for ruminations on race relations and the fate of common urban spaces.

Some of the most affecting contributions to the collection are reflections on monuments, which are themselves public meditations on the past. Robert Dallek's essay on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington combines architectural and historical analysis with an account of the politics of commemoration. While reviewing efforts to honor leaders of the Confederacy, Louis R. Harlan recalls a youthful adventure climbing Stone Mountain, Ga.

"It is important," writes Robert W. Johannsen, "[or the historian to feel the past as well as to know it" and feeling the continuing presence of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in the Old State Capitol of Illinois in Springfield enables him to know much more about the Civil War's causes. A return to his childhood home in Queens, the unsung New York borough that has since become the most ethnically diverse place in the world, helps Leuchtenburg and his readers understand the nature of historical change.

STEVEN G. KELLMAN Literary Scene Editor