October 2: Essay Question

Glassberg defines a “sense of place” as a psychological phenomenon that is begun in early childhood. He explains that attachments formed in childhood to a particular place influence the adult sensibilities, ranging from choice of garden plant to home décor; adults establish a sense of continuity with the past in this way. Childhood is not the only influence on the formation of a particular sense of place. Glassberg asserts that personal memories of friends and family can influence sense of place; the longer a person lives in an area, the greater their connection to it becomes due to associations with other memories formed throughout their time there. The place becomes part of a person’s sense of identity. This sense of personal identity is key to understand why Americans lack a connection to community and history in general. In the article “Place and Placenessness in American History” the general lack of the American public’s connectivity to community and history is explained by conflicting understandings of community history due to different interpretations by various groups and due to increased commercialization; these factors can also explain the failure of Disney’s America.

.           Within communities, different groups perceive various events differently, due to social and cultural forces of the time. This leads to a different relationship with the past for each of these groups. For example, San Francisco’s Portola Festival, while it embodies the attempt to represent a community history, actually ended up demonstrating the divisions within the society. In general, social patterns within a space itself reinforce these divisions, in terms of where people live and work. As demonstrated by Disney’s “Song of the South,” and his other attempts at history, he exhibits demonstrate historical distortion—a fabricated amalgamation of whatever is most neat and nostalgic. Disney’s hyper-sanitized history reflected the general dominant social trends of the 1950s to be content with the present, and to apply what Wallace termed “selective amnesia” to situations that were less than ideal.

It is argued that increasingly, due to a change in media exposure and an increasingly global economy that the sense of belonging in a place is increasingly deteriorating. Locations no longer seem as distinctive as perhaps they once did. Forging a sense of identity can be, in some cases, linked more to brand usage than to location. Commercialization and increased standardization, some argue, has stripped the uniqueness out of areas and has thus removed aspects from society that help the individual form a link to a particular place as unique or special. As demonstrated by the Hall of Presidents exhibit at Disney World, “sense of place” might have less to do with the failure of Disney’s America compared to a sense of time. It was no longer appropriate to have a blindly nationalistic approach to U.S. history (for example, Nixon being laughed at for being labeled a “defender of the Constitution”); media exposure had stripped away the aura of the presidency for generations that could remember more recent occurrences. As a result, Disney history failed. Once again, it was demonstrated that history could not be presented as a whitewash in an area when so much information is available and ideas could be transmitted with increasing relative ease.

Disney’s failed attempt at communicating an idea of history failed due to the inability for groups to connect to his message in a cohesive enough manner. Different views of history from within various groups, shaped by their senses of given places prevented one particular narrative becoming the historical narrative. Exposure to media (and the results it had in the case of Watergate), further eroded a sense of blind nationalism which too damaged Disney’s image of history. Suburban sprawl, transportation-induced fragmentation of community, and changes in areas contributed to the disintegration of a sense of community, hurting Disney’s concept of “Main Street”—it became alien, not the idealized norm. In addition, a sense of placelessness contributed to the inability to form a bond to certain so-called nostalgic images that Disney presented. As a result, a sense of place that is in many ways so critical to the American link to community and to its history is never fully established.