Place and Placelessness.

Glassberg repeats several of the reasons for American's historicidal tendencies. American's have no sense of history because we are such a mobile population. The Native Americans were moved out of the way to provide space for the growing USA, a past most would rather not dwell on. We (modern Americans) don't put down deep roots in our communities, instead tending to use up an area and then move on to the next. The next job, a good college, or retirement and golf tempt many to leave the old neighborhood for the next place. This harkens back to our frontier past when freedom and opportunity was associated with the westward moving boundary of European settlement. In not putting down and maintaining a lasting community, we devalue the role of community in our lives and the role of history in general in shaping present circumstances. We also have minimized our distinctiveness through mass produced consumer goods, post modern archetecture, and national corporations. A Big Mac tastes the same anywhere in America, Wal-Marts all look the same, monster mega-banks have replaced the local S & L.
Glassberg doesn't agree with these explainations of American placelessness. He argues that our sense of place is deeply involved in our development of identity as children. It is how we make sense of the world. We are influenced by the places we explore as kids in our relationships with otherpeople and places as adults. As adults, we attempt to replicate this environment in our own homes, in our social networks, and in our community involvement. We grieve when these replications are changed in ways we can't control.
A sense of place played a major role in the failure of the "Disney's America" project of the mid-1980s. Many feared that the history themed amusement park would distort American history: sentimentalizing it, making it politically correct, or reducing it to meaninglessness in the name of mass appeal. That this historical fantasy was going to be built near a very real Civil War battlefield, in a historically rural and wealty area of Virginia, and would be a 100 acre park with 2,900 acres available for hotels, retail, golf courses and resort facilities around it didn't help the park win support. Further, thanks to a previous development attempt in the area and the resulting sense of place aroused by it in the local population, Disney faced a well organized and determined coalition of groups opposed to massive development in the area. Clearly the locals did not want their region transformed by a Disney theme park. They defended the region from change and Disney was forced to cancel its plan.