Essay: October 2

One of the reasons put forth by historians to explain American’s lack of connection to community and history in general is our mobile, transitory nature. As a people, we have a tendency to continually leave places behind for other places, whether in the form of immigration from other countries or pioneers leaving home for the promise of the West. They contend that we move around too much to develop a sense of place or connection to community. The ease of transportation in today’s world only exacerbates this problem. Another reason given for our lack of a traditional sense of community is the commercialization of our culture. We cannot create an authentic sense of place when it is being created for us by corporations and the media. Everything has become standardized, nothing is distinctive. Today’s places are interchangeable: our economy and our attention spans demand it.

While Glassberg acknowledges the difficulties in creating an American sense of place, he does not completely agree with the perspectives of those historians. He describes a sense of place as the meaning we give to an environment and our perception of it, based on our memories and experiences there, combined with the meaning of the place as communicated to us by others and by the power of collective memory. While he does agree that much of this meaning is created for us, he does not agree that places are interchangeable. Even nondescript, modern, commercial buildings can have a sense of past, because time was spent there by humans who instilled them with personal meaning. He also contends that Americans don’t just have a narrow sense of one place. Today’s Americans create attachments to many places. We can be in one place and care about another place. While he agrees that it is more difficult to create a connection to community in a world that does not always value meaning (beyond meaning for one’s purse strings), he does not agree that Americans are entirely placeless. 

Disney’s America, which would have taken history and “sentimentalized it out of recognition,” endangered a place that Americans had already imbued with a strong sense of place and history (Manassas National Battlefield Park and the surrounding historic region). Historians and many Americans viewed the area as “sacred soil.” Thus, threatening it with a commercialized, schlocky version of history bordered on sacrilegious. This provided us with an example of Americans’ capacity to develop a sense of place and their willingness to defend it from corporate cartoon rodent invaders.