(4 cr.)

M 3:35 - 5:30 p.m.

Above class open to Graduates only
Above class meets with HIST-H650

“Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you
are," writes Ortega y Gasset. In this graduate colloquium we will
examine how elements of the American natural and historic landscape
are consecrated—made sacred--through processes of veneration,
defilement, and redefinition. Through a wide variety of case studies—
from sites of natural wonder, battlefields, overseas embassies,
sites of natural disaster and mass murder, popular “historic”
tourist and pilgrimage sites, and burial sites, for example—we will
appreciate the multi-disciplinary insights of scholars interested in
writing “biographies” of sacred space. We will investigate the
cultural functions of such sites—rituals of inclusion and exclusion,
physical emplacements of clashing national narratives, for example—
and complicate our understanding of the important term “the
sacred.”  Required readings may include: Kenneth Foote, Shadowed
Ground: America’s Landscape of Violence and Tragedy; selections from
David Chidester and Edward Linenthal, eds., American Sacred Space;
selections from David Chidester, Salvation and Suicide: An
Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown;
Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and An American Shrine;
selections from James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds.,
Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory;
selections from Oren Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres, eds.,
Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place; selections from Nan Ellin,
ed., Architecture of Fear; selections from Lawrence J. Vale,
Architecture, Power, and National Identity; selections from Ron
Robin, Enclaves of America: The Rhetoric of American Political
Architecture Abroad, 1900-1965, selections from Mark Monmonier, From
Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame;
and selections from John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist
Attractions in the 19th Century.

Course requirements will include substantive class participation and
short presentations, and short papers. Each colloquium participant
will also construct their own outline for a course on “American
Sacred Space,” which will include an annotated bibliography.