A featured item in the Land Water Place collection of shared materials.
America’s national and state parks have often been utilized by majority white populations. The assumption that the outdoors are a space for white, able-bodied people who have resources and time continues to influence who uses green space...
Throughout American history, economic and social systems relegated communities of color—especially Black communities—to environmentally hazardous urban landscapes. Ujiji Davis’ piece, The Bottom: The Emergence and Erasure of Black American Urban Landscapes, illustrates how the Bottom came to be in states across the country...
Dolores Hayden’s article “Urban Landscapes as Public History” and her larger book project The Power of Place accomplish a great deal in bringing together previously disparate academic and professional conversations on the meanings of place.
We commonly make sense of place through story. Beginning in 2016, a coalition of six state agencies in Minnesota, working with host sites around the state, developed a traveling exhibit and associated activities focusing on the water that makes Minnesota such a distinctive place.
Connections between water and Indigenous lives have been in the news a great deal, especially after the Standing Rock conflict in 2016-17. Often, and deservedly so, articles speak to the spiritual and cultural meanings of water for different Indigenous groups, and to how those values have endured in the face of colonizing hostility or indifference...
“Land has always been the main battleground of racial conflict in Mississippi,” as Vann R. Newkirk II argues in his long form journalistic piece “The Great Land Robbery.” Through a detailed examination of the land history of one family...
Richard M. Mizelle, Jr., a historian at the University of Houston, masterfully lays out the history and contested geographies of water in east-central North Carolina along the Tar River. Even from its 19th-century origins, the mostly African American community of Princeville struggled to form community on marshy, frequently flooded ground.
The urban designer Ken Greenberg has written about the “retreat of the industrial glacier” as a figure of speech describing the availability of land in cities that was formerly taken up by now-obsolete industrial or transportation uses...