125: Kenneth Foote's Shadowed Ground

In Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy, Kenneth Foote examines the treatment of spaces of violence and tragedy in the US to see how the relationship between private grief and larger national narratives is encoded and shaped by the landscape.  His (many) case studies include the Revolutionary and Civil Wars; the first slave arrival (in 1619), mass murders, political assassinations, violent labor and race riots, transportation accidents, fires, floods, and explosions; he argues that "the decision to render sites visible/ invisible reflects a deliberate choice regarding issues of meaning and identity."  Shadowed Ground thus contributes not just to the recovery of American history in the landscape, but to the exploration of the relationship between space and memory.

Foote argues that responses to tragic sites generally fit somewhere along this continuum, keeping in mind that the categories are not fixed: