Alicia Puglionesi
Author
Publisher
Scribner
Pub. Date
2022
Language
English
Description
"In this examination of landscape and memory, four sites of American history are revealed as places where historical truth was written over by oppressive fiction-with profound repercussions for politics past and present. Popular narratives of American history conceal as much as they reveal. They present a national identity based on harvesting the treasures that lay in wait for European colonization. In Whose Ruins tells another story: winding through...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes,...
Author
Language
English
Description
In this examination of landscape and memory, four sites of American history are revealed as places where historical truth was written over by oppressive fiction-with profound repercussions for politics past and present.
The four sections of In Whose Ruins range over the American landscape, from ancient Indigenous monuments that settlers declared to be the work of a mythical white race, to the faith-infused quest for oil in Pennsylvania, to the removal...