Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place,Memory, and Conflict

Produced over the past decade, monuments and museums dedicated to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have desegregated America's memorial landscape. Tracing a broad arc across the US South, the material elements of this landscape — historic markers, monuments, parks, registered buildings, and museums — present a distinct challenge to representations of an elite, white American past. This challenge, however, is offered in a distinctly gendered manner, inasmuch as the role of women in organizing and leading the movement is obscured. Further, the historical narratives concretized at these sites are mediated by conventions associated with civil rights historiography and the tourism development industry. The result is a complex, sometimes ironic landscape. Via the narratives they embed and the crowds they attract, these landscapes are co-constitutive with contemporary politics of representing the past in the United States. This paper offers an overview of current memorial practices and representations of the Civil Rights movement found at the country's major memorial landscapes.     

THE MONUMENT AND THE BUNGALOW

ABSTRACT. Students of human landscapes often view those landscapes as documents and seek to “read” them for cultural and historical meaning. But how does one learn to read landscape? And how can students be taught to do it? After many years of teaching courses about commonplace American landscapes, I have discovered that students must learn two things before they can expect to read human landscapes. First, they must learn to pay attention to commonplace things which most Americans normally ignore. Second, they must master vocabularies that permit them to classify elements in the landscape and to connect small things with larger ideas. Two examples in the landscape of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania—the town's war memorial and a scattering of California bungalows-demonstrate how these ideas work.     

Emerging Memorial Landscapes of Labor Conflict in the Cotton Textile South

While research into the formation of memorial landscapes in the American South has focused on those resulting from racial conflicts, a new landscape memorializing labor conflict and class consciousness is also emerging in the region's textile‐producing Piedmont. This memorialization poses significant challenges to dominant regional discourses of economic development and class mutuality in a region in which labor organizing and radical politics remain anathema. This paper examines this emerging landscape for what it can tell us about class relations in the region and the process by which memorial landscapes are formed.     

Emerging Memorial Landscapes of Labor Conflict in the Cotton Textile South

While research into the formation of memorial landscapes in the American South has focused on those resulting from racial conflicts, a new landscape memorializing labor conflict and class consciousness is also emerging in the region's textile-producing Piedmont. This memorialization poses significant challenges to dominant regional discourses of economic development and class mutuality in a region in which labor organizing and radical politics remain anathema. This paper examines this emerging landscape for what it can tell us about class relations in the region and the process by which memorial landscapes are formed.     

Landscape persistence and stakeholder perspectives: The case of Romania's Carpathians

The traditional use of land for food, fuel and wood created cultural landscapes, which are threatened across Europe. The factors which contributed to their endangerment need to be identified to achieve effective preservation of such landscapes. The aim of our study was to identify landscapes with historical persistence in a GIS-based comparative analysis of historical and contemporary maps and the most prominent causes of the past landscape changes, based on stakeholders' perspective. We considered a case study in Romania's Carpathians. Three major land cover types were extracted from maps dating from 1912, 1980 and 2009: built-up, pastures and forests. The historical persistence of all land cover types was poor (<20%) and profound changes were quantitatively confirmed. Large, compact patches of unchanged forests were located in the neighbourhood of a national park. The persistent pastures were situated close to human settlements, and their preservation can be related to local traditional agro-silvo-pastoral management. Although the built-up area has increased over time, the corresponding surfaces are small and consist of scattered patches located around historical monuments. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate stakeholders' perspective. Using cluster analysis five prominent causes of past landscape changes are identified: 'increasing tourism', 'land tenure and social changes', 'land-use intensification', 'post-communist transition', and 'foreign investments'. We join the results of the GIS analysis with those from stakeholders' perspective to gain more insights into the landscape changes. This research offers important information that could be used for the further planning of these valuable cultural landscapes in order to avoid potential conflicts and degradation.     

Globalisation,contest and paradox in a continuing cultural landscape: Land reform in the New Zealand High Country

Geografisk Tidsskrift—Danish Journal of Geography 109(2):161–179, 2009

A key feature of globalization is the way that local landscapes are progressively opened up to the influence of global markets, consumers and capital. The transformations that result are frequently politically contested, and can profoundly and quickly affect cultural landscapes that have evolved slowly over long periods. The contests over policy direction may draw upon long established ideals of occupancy and ownership, and such ‘policy myths’ may paradoxically serve to undermine the very landscapes from which they are drawn. The New Zealand South Island High Country is a distinctive continuing cultural landscape that is currently undergoing radical change as a result of land tenure reform. The unarticle demonstrates the way that cultural and political narratives and ideals are critical factors in mediating the relationship between globalization and local landscape change in this iconic landscape.     

A Street Fit for a King: Naming Places and Commemoration in the American South

The naming of streets after Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) is an importantarena for African Americans as they rewrite the landscape of southern identity and commemoration. While less ornate and ostentatious than museums and monuments, MLK streets are powerful and highly contested cultural geographies because of their potential to connect disparate communities and incorporate a vision of the past into the spatial practices of everyday life. They reveal the importance of location, particularly intra-urban location, to public memorialization. Naming streets for King is a significant part of the nonmetropolitan South as well as larger cities and dependent upon the relative size of a city's African-American population. When estimating the intra-urban character of MLK streets within several southern states, findings suggest that they are located in census areas that are generally poorer and with more African Americans than citywide averages. Analysis reveals a geographic unevenness in the frequency of businesses having an address identified with King. When compared with the stereotypical American thoroughfare of “Main” Street, the address composition of MLK streets appears to be more residential in nature, although there is significant state by state variation.     

REJECTING VIOLENCE ON THE LANDSCAPE IN LAWRENCE,KANSAS*

ABSTRACT. Lawrence, Kansas, survived a tumultuous beginning. The young town endured attacks twice, in 1856 and 1863. The second raid, by the guerrilla William Quantrill's troop of more than 400 men, resulted in the deaths of 143 citizens. Lawrence serves as an example of how Americans memorialize unconventional warfare, targeted at citizens, in a material and permanent fashion on the landscape. Small and obscurely placed memorials fill the town, to the point that they have become ordinary. The memorialized landscapes of these tragedies thus display ambivalence toward the past and symbolically reject the loss of lives despite this era's high position in the literature and archival history of the town. Additionally, Lawrence has found alternative sources for its historical identity that do not reflect these tragedies but instead celebrate the city's pioneer establishment. In this article I use a set of methods for reading the memorialized landscape that includes archival and landscape analysis and uncovers the processes that have led to this town's understated and ambivalent memorialization and identity.     

Politics,Public Space,and Memorials: The Brawl on the Mall

This paper examines recent proposals for memorials and monuments on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Demands for memorials are increasingly at odds with the Mall's important role as open green space and public protest space. This article analyzes the broader issues embodied in the competing purposes of this highly visible public space by considering the recent controversy over the World War II Memorial. The controversy focused primarily on the location of the memorial. Opponents contended the World War II Memorial would interrupt or destroy the iconography of the National Mall. Supporters argued that the location selected for the memorial was consistent with its importance in U.S. history and that it deserved such a prized location in the central axis between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The article then analyzes the politics behind the site selection, and examines the debate about the impact of the memorial's location. It concludes that the location of the memorial was not accidental but intentional, and thereby reveals a purposeful re-writing of the Mall's symbolic space to suit a specific vision of the war and its meaning in American history. The article also contends that the location of the memorial represents an emerging social-political agenda that is prioritizing the Mall as a place of commemoration at the expense of open space, and, perhaps, at the expense of public protest space.     

A Street Fit for a King: Naming Places and Commemoration in the American South

The naming of streets after Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) is an importantarena for African Americans as they rewrite the landscape of southern identity and commemoration. While less ornate and ostentatious than museums and monuments, MLK streets are powerful and highly contested cultural geographies because of their potential to connect disparate communities and incorporate a vision of the past into the spatial practices of everyday life. They reveal the importance of location, particularly intra‐urban location, to public memorialization. Naming streets for King is a significant part of the nonmetropolitan South as well as larger cities and dependent upon the relative size of a city's African‐American population. When estimating the intra‐urban character of MLK streets within several southern states, findings suggest that they are located in census areas that are generally poorer and with more African Americans than citywide averages. Analysis reveals a geographic unevenness in the frequency of businesses having an address identified with King. When compared with the stereotypical American thoroughfare of “Main” Street, the address composition of MLK streets appears to be more residential in nature, although there is significant state by state variation.     

Reexamining the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Toward an Empathetic Pedagogy of the Civil Rights Movement

Geographers have assessed the success and failure of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in terms of the African American struggle for justice, social identity, and economic survival. Conspicuously absent from the geographic literature are pedagogically oriented studies of the historical geography of the Civil Rights era. The Movement's popular image has congealed into a celebratory collection of names and dates, the sum of which is a vague, nearly mythic retelling that students might recognize but not necessarily care about. As a result, the Movement is at once contemptuously familiar yet bewilderingly strange for our students. This article offers a sympathetic critique of conventional Movement narratives, introducing the notion of empathetic pedagogy and presenting a case study of the Montgomery bus boycott. Our pedagogical approach stresses the role of empathy, both as a factor in shaping the actual sociospatial development of the Movement, as well as a strategy for encouraging students to appreciate the everyday courage and sacrifice that animated so many of its participants. Our study brings together two burgeoning literatures that have the potential to cultivate empathy among students: the critical reevaluation of mobility and explorations of subjectivity from a psychoanalytic perspective. Here mobility is understood in both its literal and figurative sense: in the case of the bus boycott, the intricate network established to literally move African Americans around the city, as well as the figurative movement of sympathy and solidarity that “moved” people to support their efforts and now informs popular, selective understandings of the protest.     

Human stewardship or ruining cultural landscapes of the ancient Tula wells, southern Ethiopia

This article uses the concepts of "human stewardship" and "ruined landscape" as a theoretical framework for analysing the community's perception of landscape change in the ancient tula well system of Borana in southern Ethiopia. The ancient tula well system, the main permanent water source, has been in operation for more than five centuries and it closely links human activity and the environment. The welfare of the tula well system and the performance of the Borana pastoral system are directly related. Borana management of the tula wells uses concepts such as laaf aadaa seeraa and laaf bade to differentiate between ‘land managed by customary laws’ (hereafter human stewardship) and ‘lost’ or ‘ruined’ land (laaf bade). The cultural landscapes of the ancient wells have undergone changes from ecosystems featuring ‘human stewardship’ (before the 1960s), that is, laaf aadaa seeraa to ‘ruined landscapes’ (after the 1960s), that is, laaf bade. Our interest is in understanding how the Borana perceive the impact of land use changes from these two conceptual perspectives. In group discussions, key informant interviews and household surveys across five of the nine well clusters, we found that the society described the changed tula cultural landscape in terms of drivers of well dynamics (i.e. use and disuse), break up of land use zonations, patterns of human settlement (traditional versus peri-urban), expansion of crop cultivation, and changes in environmental quality. Using the two concepts, we analysed linkages between changing patterns of land use that transformed the system from laaf aadaa seeraa, which ensured human stewardship, to laaf bade, which resulted in ruined landscapes. From these we analysed environmental narratives that showed how the society differentiated the past human stewardship that ensured sustainable landscape management from the present ruining of tula well cultural landscapes.     

CREATING NARRATIVES OF PLACE AND IDENTITY IN “LITTLE SWEDEN,U.S.A.”*

ABSTRACT. In Lindsborg, Kansas—“Little Sweden, U.S.A.”—the streets are lined with shops offering “An Adventure in Swedish Tradition,” and residents put on numerous festivals throughout the year highlighting Swedish folk customs. Such ethnic tourist towns have become increasingly widespread in the United States over the past thirty years. Tourists tend to perceive these places as towns where folk culture has been passed down unchanged for generations, while academics tend to dismiss residents' ethnicity as crass commercialism. Neither view is correct. Ethnicity and tradition are not static but constantly invented and reinvented. Modern folk ethnicity, among European Americans in particular, is simply the most recent incarnation of this process, one that attempts to recover ties to a specific, small‐scale landscape and history. This article explores the changing nature of the narratives of ethnicity and place‐based identity that the residents of Lindsborg have used to create a place for themselves in American society.     

PUBLIC MEMORY AND POLITICAL POWER IN GUATEMALA'S POSTCONFLICT LANDSCAPE

ABSTRACT. Landscape interpretation, or “reading” the landscape, is one of cultural geography's standard practices. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to reading landscapes transformed by insurgency movements or civil wars. Those landscapes can tell us a great deal about past and present political and social relationships as well as continuing power struggles. Guatemala presents a complicated postwar landscape “text” in which the struggle for power continues by many means and media, including how the war is portrayed on memorials, and in which the Catholic Church and the military/state are the two main competing powers. This essay explores some of the images and the text presented in Guatemala's postconflict landscape through contrasting landmarks and memorials associated with the country's thirty‐six‐year‐long civil war that formally ended in 1996.     

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CONSTRUCTION OF TOURIST SPACE IN VICTORIAN AMERICA*

ABSTRACT. Tensions and contradictions surround photographic representations of landscape—and the practices that created those representations—during the medium's so-called golden age in the late nineteenth century. These are examined by focusing on the landscape views of H. H. Bennett, a photographer of considerable renown whose stereographs and oversized panoramas of the Wisconsin Dells transformed a working river into a picturesque landscape. Such a construction of genteel tourist space in Victorian America suggests a post-frontier aesthetic in which nature is valued less as an opportunity for progress or an occasion for terror than as pleasing scenery.     

Community Stories: Explaining Resistance to Street Tree-Planting Programs in Detroit,Michigan, USA

Non-profit organizations are key actors in urban and community forestry (UCF) initiatives, and sometimes city residents resist their efforts. Between 2011-2014, 24 percent of residents offered a street tree in Detroit, Michigan, USA submitted a “no-tree request.” Differing views on decision-making emerged as a main reason for resistance to tree planting. This study used interviews with city residents, and those within a non-profit organization, between 2014-2016 to understand reasons for conflict over decision-making between these groups. Heritage narratives, or selective representations of the city’s history and character, helped explain conflict over tree planting. Residents who wanted greater decision-making power in tree planting assumed they would be responsible for stewardship, reflecting their historical experiences within the city. The organization’s dominant heritage narrative emphasized that residents held misperceptions of trees based on negative past experiences, and required education on benefits of trees. Recommendations for integrating heritage narratives into UCF efforts are provided.     

Competing Place Meanings in Complex Landscapes: A Social–Ecological Approach to Unpacking Community Conservation Outcomes on the Wild Coast,South Africa

Despite a general awareness of the social–ecological complexities within which conservation interventions are embedded, approaches to understanding a diversity of local perspectives of heterogeneous landscapes and how they matter for the outcomes of these interventions are seldom demonstrated. We apply a social–ecological approach to exploring the multiple place meanings related to key landscape elements around a proposed community conservation intervention on the Wild Coast, South Africa, by identifying and analyzing three narratives about this impending change. These narratives mobilize competing meanings of the landscape to argue for or against the conservation project. By linking place meanings to locally defined landscape units (ecotopes), we engage multiple interpretations of the heterogeneous and changing landscape to gain a holistic and more inclusive picture of social–ecological landscape processes such as increasing woodlands and field abandonment. The obstruction of this particular intervention indicates the importance of engaging with multiple cultural values of nature.     

Integrated Approaches,Multiple Scales: Snag Dynamics in Burned Versus Unburned Landscapes*

By studying landscape form and patterns, we can study processes at multiple scales and determine how collectively those processes inform us about function(s). Integrating landscape ecology from a biogeographical perspective with geographic information science (GIScience) practices offers new ways to study how landscapes change over time and space, including how they can be measured, analyzed, and modeled for management needs. This article presents methodologies and selected results of analyzing spatial patterns from field data across multiple scales by examining standing dead tree (snag) processes across wildfire‐disturbed landscapes in Arizona. Our primary motivation was to illustrate a particular type of work benefiting from the coalescing of landscape ecology and GIScience, functioning at the methodological and practical overlap of these two contributing fields. Our management goals were to (1) describe spatial patterns and characteristics of snags in pairs of burned and unburned ponderosa pine forests of Arizona in four recent (within the past ten years) wildfires, (2) document bird response to wildfires by combining landscape ecology and GIScience methods, and (3) link these patterns to snag monitoring plots and cavity‐nesting bird use to predict the probability of snag use by birds and cavity nesters based on snag characteristics (snag use model). The methods and results demonstrate how integration of landscape ecology with both GIS and GIScience improves the ways to study landscapes and land management issues, in this case offering guidelines for retention of snags that provide habitat for wildlife.     

“A Mirror and a Lamp”: The Role of Power in the Rural Landscape Trajectory of the Ovens Region of Australia

Power relationships structure discourse and its influence on policy and rural land use planning, but little research has examined how this might be observed in the dynamics of rural landscape transition. In a qualitative case study of the Ovens catchment, Victoria, Australia, discursive power is observed through sites of tension between informant interpretations of past, present, and future landscapes and contemporary local decision making. Three main tensions and an observation emerged that suggest discourse and power can be observed through the transfer and support of social memory narratives. We conclude that the identification of tensions between stakeholder perceptions of the past, present, and future of their landscape; awareness of the influence of those interpretations on current decision making; and attention to social memory narratives can provide invaluable insights for those seeking to understand local relationships of power.