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First Published in 2011. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor &
Francis, an informa company.
Between Barkley and Kentucky Lakes--two great, artificial bodies of
water in western Tennessee and western Kentucky--lies a wooded land
that looks from above like the flattened thumb of a green giant.
Once a land of marginal farms and small settlements, this
240-square-mile peninsula, known as the Land Between the Lakes, has
been a national recreation area for the last half-century. Its
rolling, wooded hills and open bottomlands give the place charm but
little majesty. The place swallows up its few campgrounds and
visitors they attracts, creating a vacuous tranquility. In this
volume, Foresta explores how this forgotten and bypassed region
became a national recreation area. He uses its history to retrieve
our old attitudes toward nature, progress, and personal
development. He also uses its history to retrieve a vision of the
future that rallied idealists, intellectuals, and even public
officials to its banner.
In the early 1960s, the Tennessee Valley Authority set out to
create a great park for posterity at the Land Between the Lakes.
The park was to host the vast stretches of leisure that wealthy,
secure, and more equal Americans of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries would have at their disposal. It would be a
place where such Americans could turn that leisure into happiness,
psychic well-being, and strength of character. The TVA cleared the
land of its inhabitants to create the park, removing people from
their homes and severing their roots, thus effacing the history of
the place. It then set about reshaping the land in the image of an
anticipated future. But when that future never arrived, managers
struggled to fit the place to the America that actually came into
being. In the end they failed, leaving the Land Between the Lakes
enveloped in a haunting sense of emptiness.
A deft blend of environmental history, geography, politics, and
cultural history, " Land Between the Lakes" demonstrates both the
idealism of mid-twentieth-century planners and how quickly such
idealism can fall out of alignment with the flow of history. In so
doing it explores a forgotten vision of the future that was in many
ways more appealing than the present that came into being in its
place.
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