American Places: Encounters with History : a Celebration of Sheldon Meyer

Front Cover
William Edward Leuchtenburg
Oxford University Press, 2000 - Biography & Autobiography - 398 pages
In American Places, more than two dozen of America's most gifted historians write about their encounters with historic places, bringing a personal viewpoint to bear on a wide variety of sites, ranging from Monticello to Fenway Park. Here James M. McPherson writes about the battlefield of Gettysburg, and how walking the ground of Pickett's Charge inspired one of his books. Kevin Starr visits the Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood and finds many of the flavors of California history there. Joel Williamson takes a bemused tour of Elvis Presley's Graceland, and David Kennedy tells the story of the "Pig War" on San Juan Island, where a spat between Britain and America over a speck of land in the Pacific Northwest helped determine the shape of the U.S. and Canada. William Freehling compares two places, Charleston's Battery and New Orleans' Jackson Square, showing how each reveals the different spirit of the society that created it. And Edward Ayers talks about spending time in Cyberspace, U.S.A. Other pieces include Robert Dallek on the FDR Memorial, David Hackett Fischer on the Boston Common, and William Leuchtenburg on his native borough of Queens.
American Places celebrates the career of Sheldon Meyer, who over his years at Oxford University Press has published some of America's most distinguished historians, including many Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize winners, virtually all of whom have contributed to this volume.

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Contents

CYBERSPACE USA
3
The Avenue of the Presidents
15
Memory in a Massachusetts Town
29
A Window on Race in the American South
41
American Cemetery and Memorial
53
THE FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT MEMORIAL WASHINGTON DC
67
THE AMERICANIZED MANNHEIM OF 19451946
79
VASSAR COLLEGE
93
Elbert Hubbard and the Roycroft Community at East Aurora New York
201
The Pig War and the Vagaries of Identity and History
219
1048 FIFTH AVENUE
233
QUEENS
241
GETTYSBURG
261
MONTICELLO
269
THE MUSSO FRANK GRILL IN HOLLYWOOD
283
THE POLO GROUNDS
295

Or Why We Love It When They Always Break Our Hearts
105
FINDING HISTORY IN WOODSIDE CALIFORNIA
115
BOSTON COMMON
125
CHARLESTONS BATTERY AND NEW ORLEANSS JACKSON SQUARE
145
CLIMBING STONE MOUNTAIN
157
The Rise and Fall of Main Street
169
A Tale of Two Speeches
185
NASSAU HALL PRINCETON NEW JERSEY
311
GRACELAND
325
MONTGOMERY
339
THE GRAND CANYON
353
Memories of the 1940s
365
NOTES
389
Copyright

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About the author (2000)

Born in Ridgewood (Queens), New York, William Leuchtenburg is currently William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was educated at Cornell University and at Columbia University, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1951. After teaching briefly at Smith College and Harvard University, he began a 30-year tenure on the faculty at Columbia, where he became De Witt Clinton Professor of American History in 1971. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the Society of American Historians, and most recently (1991) the American Historical Association. He has also been Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University. Leuchtenburg is an expert on twentieth-century U.S. political history, especially the era of the New Deal. His book Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932--1940 (1963) won both the Bancroft and Parkman prizes.

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