In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a variety of
sources and disciplinary approaches-archaeological, historical,
architectural, literary, and art-historical-to show how places take
on, convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful
Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in which
various groups, from patriots and politicians of the antebellum era
to present-day archaeologists and preservationists, have
transformed key landscapes into historical, indeed sacred, spaces.
The sites King examines include the region's vanishing tobacco
farms; St. Mary's City, established as Maryland's first capital by
English settlers in the seventeenth century; and Point Lookout, the
location of a prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the
Civil War. As the author explores the historical narratives
associated with such places, she uncovers some surprisingly durable
myths as well as competing ones. St. Mary's City, for example,
early on became the center of Maryland's "founding narrative" of
religious tolerance, a view commemorated in nineteenth-century
celebrations and reflected even today in local museum exhibits and
preserved buildings. And at Point Lookout, one private group has
established a Confederate Memorial Park dedicated to those who died
at the prison, thus nurturing the Lost Cause ideology that arose in
the South in the late 1800s, while nearby the custodians of a
1,000-acre state park avoid controversy by largely ignoring the
area's Civil War history, preferring instead to concentrate on
recreation and tourism, an unusually popular element of which has
become the recounting of ghost stories. As King shows, the
narratives that now constitute the public memory in southern
Maryland tend to overlook the region's more vexing legacies,
particularly those involving slavery and race. Noting how even her
own discipline of historical archaeology has been complicit in
perpetuating old narratives, King calls for research-particularly
archaeological research-that produces new stories and
"counter-narratives" that challenge old perceptions and
interpretations and thus convey a more nuanced grasp of a
complicated past.
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