Customer Reviews

Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you arrange your library by category you may have trouble with this book. History? True Crime? Cultural Geography? Anthropology? Sociology? American Studies?

The book covers the sites of disaster, assassination, murder and accident all across America, including nearly every site and shrine in Texas. We review it not just for it's interesting content, but its coverage of a most unusual type of geography. It's a thought-provoking book at how, why and in what manner we deal with the sites of violence (and tragedy).

The individual stories of the incidents are told completely, but without distracting from the book's theme.

It's a unique book and should remain so for some time. Foote's thoroughness guarantees that.

Excellent overview of why we choose to designate tragic events in some cases, and hush-up others shamefully. Poignant, original...no other book so comprehensively covers the geography of painful memorials. An interesting sequel could be written regarding domestic terrorism, not just in America, but regarding other countries' place-memorials of such events.

This book explores the way Americans interpret and define landscapes that have been sites of violence and tragedy. It exhaustively researches the factors that have contributed to monument-making at sites that are critical in American history. Also explored are the various ways communities interpret tragedy: by sanctifying, reclaiming, or obliterating the traces of tragic histories, communities leave impressions on the landscape that reflect their sorrow, their shame, or their pride over past events. This is interdisciplinary work at its best: simultaneously history, geography, and sociology. The detail of the historical research presented is astounding, and that research, together with a lively application of Durkheim's theories of social solidarity, open the reader to a new understanding of the American landscape.

I read this book a couple of years and found it amazing!
It's heartbreaking, bloodchilling, and inspiring, all in one
book. These are stories that often remain untold and hidden in our culture, yet they are a distinct and vital part of
our national experience. I read the first edition, by the way,
and I now plan to buy the second, updated edition, which I
anticipate will deal with the World Trade Center attacks, the
Pentagon attack, and the Shencksville, PA, air crash. If you
buy one book this year, buy this one!

The book starts out by saying it will look at how Americans have memorialized, or failed to memorialize, tragic events such as unavoidable accidents, heroic battles, instances of martyrdom, or senseless acts of violence. To some degree the book is organize around these, but other chapters introduce other ideas, such as "stigmata of national identity." Foote's analytical categories don't follow this list, however - - he classifies the process of memorialization into four categories of response: sanctification, designation, rectification, and obliteration. There isn't a coherent explanation of how a tragedy ends up in one category or another. However, Chapter 8 - - not the final chapter, by the way - - examines themes of "selectivity," "hierarchy," and "practice" that affect this memorialization.

All of which is to say that the organization of the argument in this book, and the organization of the chapters, is an analytical mess.

Fortunately, the stories Foote tells are pretty interesting. He tells of communities deciding to memorialize industrial accidents and other tragedies. Foote gives us the stories of Texans and Mormons reinterpreting history through their monuments, and how Bostonians changed their minds about the Boston Massacre. We see controversies over John Brown at Harpers Ferry, important labor movement sites, anti-war protests, and all the rest. Those stories all make the book well worth reading.

Thoughtful look at the role monuments and memorials in American society. Focusing on tragic and violent memorials, the book offers an interesting perspective on historical events.

This is an astonishing book, one that defies easy categorization or even any categorization at all. It is by turns
thought-provoking, horrifying, and inspiring, and the buyer will never regret the money spent on it. This book will stay with the reader for a long time to come.

I haven't read the book yet, but the cover image is amazing!