Making History • HIST 1105 • Week 11.1

History, Memory, and Public Space

  • James W. Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (1999), “Some Functions of Public History” and “The Sociology of Historic Sites”, 13–24
  • Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (1995), ch. 2, “Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space”, 14–43

Loewen is cited by the page of the revised edition (The New Press, 2019), which the course PDF reproduces. Hayden is cited by the page of the MIT Press edition.

Today in context

What makes history happen?

Week 10.1 · Maza, with Jenkins

Language. Sources read as texts, and histories as made things.

Week 10.2 · Campus history with AI

A machine that puts words together the way readers expect. Whether it can write history.

Week 11.1 · Loewen and Hayden

Commemoration and space. What gets put up, by whom, and who a place lets in.

A color photograph of a bald, white-bearded man in a dark jacket, seen in profile, speaking into a microphone at a lectern
James W. Loewen · 1942–2021 A sociologist from Decatur, Illinois, who taught at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, then for twenty years at the University of Vermont. Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995) took on high-school textbooks; Lies Across America (1999) took the same questions to historic sites across the country.Why he matters: he reads markers and monuments as documents with authors and sponsors, so a visitor can ask who put them up and why.(Skyline College, 2015. Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; non-commercial use.)

Loewen · “Some Functions of Public History”

For Loewen, teaching the past is not the main reason for a monument

“Why have Americans put up hundreds of thousands of markers and monuments across the landscape?”

Loewen, Lies Across America, p. 13
His answer

Learning from the past is “hardly the only reason for public history,” and “not even the primary reason” (p. 13). He starts with stories, class power and a civil religion (pp. 13–14).

Loewen · stories

Human beings live by stories, Loewen argues, and monuments supply the heroes

“Individuals who have not forged a heroic narrative of their own can nonetheless feel part of something important—in this case, our nation’s progress—by identifying with others who performed heroic deeds.”

Loewen, Lies Across America, p. 13
On the landscape

A heroic story can be borrowed. Remembering these deeds “on the landscape,” Loewen says, “meets this human need” (p. 13).

A bronze statue of a Civil War soldier in a kepi and long overcoat, both hands resting on the muzzle of a rifle, seen from below against a blue sky with thin cloud and bare branches
A Civil War soldier on the town green, Manchester, Connecticut Sculpted by Carl Conrads in 1876: a hero anyone in town can claim, in a place people pass every day.
(Marty Aligata, 2016. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)

Loewen · class

Loewen argues that commemorating history helps the upper class stay upper

“Usually, behind even the simplest aluminum plaque lurks someone who feels good about its installation. The efforts of the upper class to commemorate their history help them feel better psychologically; the results also help them stay upper. History is power.”

Loewen, Lies Across America, p. 13
Who shapes the memory

Those on top of society know this, Loewen says, so “they take the time to determine how history will be remembered” (pp. 13–14).

A pink granite marker on a concrete base, lettered in black: Santa Fe Trail, 1822–1872, marked by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Kansas, 1906, with juniper and gravel beside it
A Santa Fe Trail marker, Ellinwood, Kansas, 1906 The stone names its sponsors: the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Kansas. Behind even a plain marker, Loewen says, is someone who “feels good about its installation.”
(Chris Light, 2012. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.)

Loewen · a civil religion

Memorials, Loewen argues, mostly declare that the state is worth dying for

“Monuments and markers provide sacred sites for what sociologist Robert Bellah called America’s ‘civil religion.’ Memorials, in particular, declare what is worth dying for, which turns out to be mostly the state, in war.”

Loewen, Lies Across America, p. 14
A shared heritage

Tenth-generation Americans and recent immigrants alike can “glory in what the founders achieved in Philadelphia” and mourn at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (p. 14).

A pale stone statue of a World War I infantryman in a helmet, holding a rifle, on a tall column above shop roofs and a pharmacy sign, against a gray sky and wooded hills
A World War I “doughboy” in the town square, Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania Sacred sites at everyday scale: a soldier on a column above a pharmacy sign.
(Canadian2006, 2011. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.)

Loewen · what monuments do to thinking

Most monuments, Loewen argues, tell visitors that whatever happened was good

The state is rarely criticized

Most war memorials turn their conflicts into “noble causes.” Markers rarely criticize the government (p. 14).

Thinking is discouraged

A modest plaque “speaks with authority,” as if its message were “incontestable” (p. 14).

The future inherits it

One generation’s monuments become “a force imprisoning the minds” of the next. Local ones can “empower people” too (p. 17).

A bronze statue of a woman in a long robe holding a torch high in her right hand and a book in her left, on a lawn with rows of folding chairs set out before it and a university building and wooded hill behind
A copy of the 1989 “Goddess of Democracy” at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010 The original stood in Tiananmen Square in 1989. “Even in the United States,” blared the government’s loudspeakers, “statues need permission before they can be put up” (Loewen, p. 18). This copy was removed in 2021.
(Cyberviewer, 2010. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.)

Loewen · “The Sociology of Historic Sites”

Monuments need approval, and only certain kinds go up

State marker offices

Early one-person offices made errors; review boards from the late 1950s did better. In Georgia, a legislator’s call could still take a marker down (pp. 18–20).

Sponsors

Often a private club raises part of the cost and a city or state pays the rest. No relatively disinterested state body reviews monuments (pp. 20–21).

Who gets remembered

Indian wars, which many textbooks drop; labor, which has influence and money; and the upper class, “always” (pp. 21–22).

Happy history

Communities usually mark “only their happy history.” Burlington honors Ethan Allen, whom Abenakis see as “a rapacious Indian-hater” (p. 23).

A white cast-metal roadside marker headed 1630–1930 under the Massachusetts seal, titled Hassanamesit, on a black post in front of a stone obelisk, with small American flags along a fence and trees behind
A Massachusetts Bay Colony Tercentenary marker, Grafton, 1930 The happy version: Eliot’s 1651 mission village and James the Printer. Of the state’s 234 markers, 11% were on King Philip’s War (Loewen, p. 21); this one never mentions it.
(Elizabeth Thomsen, 2014. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.)
A worn title page inside a printed ornamental border, in Massachusett: Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament, John Eliot, Cambridge, 1663
Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God (“The Whole Holy His-Bible God”), Cambridge, 1663 John Eliot’s Bible in Massachusett, the book the marker is proud of, printed for Christian Indians like those at Hassanamesit. Daniel Gookin, the colony’s superintendent of Christian Indians, recorded what happened to them in 1675.
(Houghton Library, Harvard University. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)

Hassanamesit · November 1675

The marker leaves out the war that emptied Hassanamesit in 1675

“they will either force you all to some Island as the Natick Indians are, where you will be in danger to be starved with cold and hunger, and most probably in the end be all sent out of the country for slaves.”

Nipmuc fighters on the English, as reported by Daniel Gookin, 1677, p. 476
Deer Island

About two hundred went with the fighters. By December the colony held five hundred other Christian Indians on Deer Island, “bleak and cold” (pp. 476, 485).

Still in Grafton

Hassanamisco Nipmuc families still hold a small reservation in Grafton.

Loewen · how to read a marker

People, not gods, write markers, so ask how each might be wrong

“Markers and monuments are often written in stone, but they are not written by gods. People put them up.”

Loewen, Lies Across America, p. 20
His questions

Ask, “How might this be wrong?” Distrust “According to tradition . . .” Ask why the sponsors went to the trouble of putting it up (pp. 20–21).

Hayden · The Power of Place, 1995

An architect and urban historian reads the whole city as social history

A video still of a woman with short dark hair in a red jacket over a black turtleneck, speaking in front of shelves of archive boxes and papers
Dolores Hayden · photograph by Dean Terry · Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

“This chapter sketches a way to frame the social history of urban space, a scholarly terrain where many fields overlap.” Hayden, The Power of Place, p. 15

Loewen stops at markers and monuments. Hayden, an architect who taught at UCLA and Yale, ran The Power of Place in Los Angeles, marking sites of working people’s lives.

Hayden · Lefebvre, 1974

Chapter 2’s starting point: space is produced

A black and white photograph of an older man with swept-back gray hair, in a jacket over a white turtleneck, looking to the side
Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991), 1971 · Bert Verhoeff, Nationaal Archief · CC BY-SA 3.0 NL

“Authentic knowledge of space must address the question of its production.” Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974), Hayden’s epigraph, p. 14

Hayden builds the chapter on the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Her question is how any place gets made, and for whom.

Hayden · the production of space

Hayden counts ditchdiggers and housewives among a city’s makers

“Indigenous residents as well as colonizers, ditchdiggers as well as architects, migrant workers as well as mayors, housewives as well as housing inspectors, are all active shaping the urban landscape.”

Hayden, The Power of Place, p. 15
Lefebvre’s term

The production of space: how places are “planned, designed, built, inhabited, appropriated, celebrated, despoiled, and discarded” (p. 15).

Several women in hats and long skirts replastering the mud wall of a flat-roofed adobe house with a stepped parapet; one stands on a ladder against the wall, another kneels at the top, and piles of mud, a tub and a chair sit in the foreground
Replastering an adobe house, Chamisal, New Mexico, 1940 Hayden prints it: a rural building, easier to read than urban real estate, which “may still convey some surprises—such as women doing the construction” (p. 31).
(Russell Lee, Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress. Public domain.)

Hayden · “place”

Hayden joins the sense of place to the politics of space

“‘Place’ is one of the trickiest words in the English language, a suitcase so overfilled one can never shut the lid. It carries the resonance of homestead, location, and open space in the city as well as a position in a social hierarchy.”

Hayden, The Power of Place, p. 15
The sense of place

Place reaches all five senses, which makes it “powerful as a source of memory” (p. 18).

The politics of space

Phrases like “knowing one’s place” are spatial and political at once (p. 16). Cultural geography, she says, kept to rural landscapes, “avoiding issues of political contestation” (p. 17).

Lefebvre, through Hayden · pp. 18–19

Every society, Lefebvre argues, builds space for production and for social reproduction

Production

Spaces “shaped for mining, manufacturing, commerce, or real estate speculation.”

The body

Biological reproduction, in the space in and around the body.

Housing

Reproduction of the labor force, in the space of housing.

The city

Reproduction of social relations, in the public space of the city.

Hayden · three histories to write

Hayden turns Lefebvre into three kinds of history a historian can write

Working landscapes

Who built and kept up the farms, mines, railroads and streetcars, a history that has “barely been studied” (pp. 20–22).

Territorial histories

Ghettos and barrios, reservations and camps; for women, the body, the home and the street: territories with enforced boundaries (pp. 22–29).

Building types

The political life of ordinary buildings: who built, owned, regulated and rented them (pp. 30–34).

A sepia photograph of a board-and-batten building with an outside stair on a hillside, a Chinese man in a work shirt standing at the foot of the stair, and across a dirt yard a small timbered opening in a brushy slope, with lumber piled in front
Workers’ barracks by Wrights Tunnel, Santa Cruz Mountains, about 1880 A working landscape: a Chinese worker outside the barracks. Building this tunnel killed twenty-nine Chinese workers in 1879 and injured dozens more (Hayden, p. 21).
(Photographer unknown. Bancroft Library, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)
A black and white photograph of a brick movie theater: a man climbs an outside staircase along the side wall toward an upper door, beneath a sign reading Colored Adm. 10 cents, with a large Dr Pepper advertisement painted above
A movie house in Belzoni, Mississippi, October 1939 A territorial history: Black moviegoers took the outside stair. Photographs of segregated entrances like this one, Hayden writes, “convey territorial history” (p. 24).
(Marion Post Wolcott, Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress. Public domain.)
A restored nineteenth-century tenement parlor with patterned wallpaper, lace curtains, a treadle sewing machine by the window, a mantel clock, a small table and worn floorboards
A restored apartment at 97 Orchard Street, the Tenement Museum, New York A building type: a tenement of 1863, a museum since 1988. Standing in such a flat, Hayden writes, “leaves a visitor gasping for air and looking for light” (p. 33).
(Carol M. Highsmith. Library of Congress. Public domain.)

Hayden · territorial histories

Keeping people out of space, Hayden argues, is a way of limiting their rights

“One of the consistent ways to limit the economic and political rights of groups has been to constrain social reproduction by limiting access to space.”

Hayden, The Power of Place, p. 22
Los Angeles · the 1940s

An African American lawyer who grew up there remembered, “As teen-agers, we knew not to drive into Compton, to Inglewood, not to drive into Glendale” (quoted in Hayden, p. 23).

Hayden · ordinary buildings

Hayden reads an ordinary building as a record of power

“most buildings can be understood in terms of power or authority—as efforts to assume, extend, resist, or accommodate it.”

Camille Wells, quoted in Hayden, The Power of Place, p. 30
The tenement

A New York tenement around 1900 could return its landlord 25 percent a year. “One building tells the story of thousands of developers and millions of tenants” (pp. 33–34).

A printed photograph of a three-story brick building with steep gables, tall chimneys and arched windows, standing alone on bare ground
Hodgin Hall, University of New Mexico, 1904 UNM’s first building, put up in brick in 1892, as New Mexico showed it at the St. Louis fair.
(The Land of Sunshine, New Mexico’s handbook for the 1904 fair, via Internet Archive; no known restrictions.)
A flat-roofed, tan stucco building with stepped massing, projecting wooden beams and a wooden balcony, behind desert plants and a sign reading Hodgin Hall
The same building, now UNM’s alumni center, 2024 In 1908 the university’s president, William G. Tight, had it remodeled to look like a pueblo. What history does the new look claim for the university, and who was asked?
(Kenneth C. Zirkel, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.)

Wilson · The Myth of Santa Fe, 1997

Wilson argues that Santa Fe’s famous look was built in the early twentieth century

Chris Wilson

Founding director of UNM’s Historic Preservation and Regionalism program. His book asks how a small capital of about 5,000 people in 1912 got the look it is known for.

How it was made

Largely by Anglo-American newcomers, Wilson argues. After statehood in 1912, leaders built the town’s economy on its heritage: restorations that were partly speculation, visible signs of Americanization removed, new buildings put under design review.

The story it tells

Three peoples living in harmony. Wilson argues that story oversimplifies Native American culture, the mixing of cultures, and the tensions between them.

A black and white halftone of a long adobe building in Santa Fe with a deep porch of tall columns under a balustrade, men and boys standing in its shade, utility poles along the dirt street and a wagon wheel at the edge of the frame
The Governor’s Palace, Santa Fe, 1904 The porch before the restoration: columns, a balustrade, utility poles. In 1909 the new Museum of New Mexico began restoring the building.
(The Land of Sunshine, 1904, via Internet Archive; no known restrictions.)
A black and white photograph of a long, flat-roofed adobe building with plain plastered walls and a porch of rough posts under projecting beams, with several 1930s cars parked along the front and bare trees at either side
The Palace of the Governors, 1934 After the 1909–13 restoration: rough posts, projecting beams. How much of the earlier look did the restorers know, and how much did they imagine?
(M. James Slack, Historic American Buildings Survey, 1934. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)

Hayden · the chapter’s end

For Hayden, how a place feels and who controls it are bound together

“Places make memories cohere in complex ways. People’s experiences of the urban landscape intertwine the sense of place and the politics of space.”

Hayden, The Power of Place, p. 43
Counter-space

In East Harlem, Puerto Rican organizers built casitas, island houses, among abandoned tenements. They “produced their own public space,” Hayden’s example of Lefebvre’s “counter-space” (pp. 35–36).

A small turquoise wooden house with a yellow-trimmed porch, railings and a ramp, in a garden with a young tree and paving stones, with brick apartment buildings rising behind it
Casita Rincón Criollo (“Downhome Corner”), South Bronx, New York Counter-space: a rural Puerto Rican house among apartment blocks. Begun on a vacant lot in the late 1970s, it moved a block in 2007 when the city took the lot for housing.
(Miss April NYC, via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.)
The end wall of a two-story stucco apartment building painted with a mural: the words Orale Raza in large outlined letters, a blue hand, painted faces, a rose, and a dark portrait of a man with long hair, under a blue sky
“Órale raza” (“Right on, people”), Estrada Courts, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles Counter-space: Chicano artists painted about eighty murals on this public housing project in the 1970s. Hayden photographed two in 1980; such murals set up “a political dialogue with the surrounding city” (pp. 36–38).
(waltarrrrr, via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.)
A screenshot of the Mapping Inequality website: on the left, a panel with the appraisers' description of Los Angeles area D53; on the right, a scanned 1939 map with Boyle Heights outlined and filled in red
Mapping Inequality: Boyle Heights (area D53), Los Angeles, graded in 1939 Territory, mapped: University of Richmond historians put the 1930s redlining maps and appraisers’ notes online. Estrada Courts sits in D53, graded “Hazardous,” “literally honeycombed with diverse and subversive racial elements.”
(Screenshot, dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining.)
A map of Minneapolis shading city blocks by their share of Black residents in 2010, darkest in the north and south-central city, with racially restricted properties in solid dark red clustered in the southwest, along the city's edges and in the suburbs
Mapping Prejudice: racial covenants (dark red) and the share of Black residents in 2010, Minneapolis Since 2016, volunteers have read old deeds for clauses barring anyone not White, Hayden’s “deed restrictions” (p. 25). Against the 2010 census, most covenanted blocks still have few Black residents.
(Marguerite Mills, Mapping Prejudice, 2020. CC BY-NC 4.0.)

Loewen and Hayden

Loewen reads what was put up; Hayden reads everything that was built

Loewen · Lies Across America, 1999

Markers and monuments are documents with sponsors. Ask who got them approved, who paid, and how they might be wrong (pp. 18–21).

Hayden · The Power of Place, 1995

Every street and building was produced by someone, for work and for daily life, and its boundaries often keep people out (pp. 19–22, 30).

The lecture · looking back

From what monuments do to how all space gets made

Loewen, pp. 13–24

What monuments do

Supply heroes, help the upper class stay upper and unify more than they teach, and usually mark only the happy history.

Hassanamesit

The happy version

A mission village marker without the war that emptied the village.

Hayden, ch. 2

How space gets made

Work, territory and ordinary buildings, read as the production of space, down to a remodeled Hodgin Hall.

The take home

A monument is a source about the people who put it up

What it records

When it went up, who paid, and what they were proud of. The Grafton marker tells more about 1930 than about 1651.

What Hayden adds

The rest of the landscape is a source too. Tunnels, movie houses and tenements record who built them and who was kept out (pp. 20–34).

The catch: a corrected marker is still a marker. It speaks with the same authority Loewen distrusts.

Next · Thursday, 11.2

Next: AI and the future of history, and the archive behind your campus history

Hodgin Hall stands on the campus you are researching. Its records may show who argued over the 1908 remodel, and why.