Fountaindale Public Library

In whose ruins, power, possession, and the landscapes of American empire, Alicia Puglionesi

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 301-332) and index

illustrationsmaps

index present

non fiction

In whose ruins

bibliography

1292925057

Alicia Puglionesi

power, possession, and the landscapes of American empire

Popular narratives of American history conceal as much as they reveal, presenting a national identity based on harvesting the treasures that lay in wait for European colonization. In Whose Ruins tells another story: winding through the landscape of the United States, from Native American earthworks in West Virginia to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, this history is a tour of sites that were mined for an empire's power. In these pages, historian Alicia Puglionesi illuminates the story of the Grave Creek Stone, "discovered" in an ancient Indigenous burial mound and used to promote the theory that a lost white race predated Native people in North America - part of a wider effort to justify European conquest with alternative histories. When oil was discovered in the corner of western Pennsylvania soon known as Petrolia, prospectors framed that treasure, too, as a birthright passed to them, through Native guides, from a lost race. On the Susquehanna River, ancient petroglyphs were dynamited into pieces to make way for a hydroelectric dam, foreshadowing the flooding of Native lands around the country; over the course of the twentieth century, almost every major river was damned for economic purposes. And in the Southwest, the US nuclear program contaminated vast regions in the name of eternal wealth and security. Each story illuminates the hidden costs of ruthless economic growth, particularly to Indigenous people and ways of understanding. From the ground up, the project of settlement and expansion was entwined with the spiritual values of those who hoped to gain from it, such that extraction of natural resources became a religious quest. Every nation tells some stories and suppresses others, and In Whose Ruins exposes the beliefs, fears, and desires that bind us into an unsustainable future. Connecting the power of myths with the extraction of power from the land itself, this work is an invaluable torchin the the search for a way forward

adult