The United States is a country of frontiersmen, colonists and settlers; Americans are constantly on the move. Once those original colonies started to have some semblance of civilization to them, some people began to spread out, moving further away from the main cities, farming, trapping, trading, and that process never really stopped. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the frontier was the interior lands just beyond the Appalachians, they were hard to get to, and populated by people who were not always the most friendly to colonists. As time wore on though, the Appalachians became more passable as they were explored, riverways better mapped, and the Indians pushed further west. In time, Ohio and the territories nearby started becoming civilized as well and the frontier moved on, eventually reaching the Pacific ocean. But in that time, how many people have truly settled down and taken roots? There are certainly established families in places like Massachusetts and Virginia and other places in the East that have been settled longer, but the further west, the less time has passed since settlers came to that land.
In my opinion, to have a sense of place, one must have an anchor to that place. In Europe, a resident of Heidelberg can look at the castle there and know it has been there for centuries. There are families that have lived there for generations. The United States does not have an established history like that. No families have been where they are for centuries.
Glassberg does give several reasons for this "Placelessness." A sense of place does not naturally spring from the ground, places are not interchangeable, place values come from real objects in those places, we experience places with indeterminate but finite areas, we associate with the feelings of others in our area, and we are defined by where we see ourselves in space and history. These six things are hard for Americans to truly fit into all of those categories. In many ways, we associate ourselves with not just where we grew up (if different from where we live), but where our family came from before moving to America; I am primarily from the UK, English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and I identify with them more than I identify with the French. I associate with places that I played at while growing up, whether they are there or not now. But I also associate with people whom I have lived with for several years, even if they are from Maryland and I consider myself an Ohioan. There are many things that we can use to establish place.
Building something to create a sense of place will not work, there have been many examples of this. The capital of Brazil, Brasilia, is a prime example, it may be in the middle of the country, but it is not accessible, nor does it have a history of its own, with out drawing on the history of cities thousands of miles away. Similarly, a created language cannot succeed because it doesn't have the built up history to connect the speaker to the language. This was a concept of J.R.R. Tolkien in the creation of his elven languages, in order for a reader to feel the emotion of it, there needed to be a history, and that comes out in the forms or the language, and the legends that were written with it, it creates a connection that would not exist if a language was just "built" to be easy to learn. Similarly, a theme park that is malleable does not create a sense of history because it is easy for something to appear and disappear without much effort. History and a sense of history and place cannot be like that, there needs to be permanence.
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