Description
Book SynopsisPresidents and Place: America's Favorite Sons highlights the interrelationship between America's leading political icons and various facets of space and place, including places of birth and death as well as regional allegiances, among others. Chapters examine the legacy of relationships between presidents and place in a variety of social and cultural forms, ranging from famous political campaigns to television series to developments in tourism. Beginning with the political iconography of New York's Federal Hall in early eighteenth-century America and ending with a focus on the Republican Party's electoral relationship with the South, the interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse nature of the chapters reveals that place has more than a biographical significance in relation to US presidents.
Trade ReviewFrom the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, Thomas J. Cobb and Olga Akroyd and a cast of contributors consider the places that shaped presidents and other key figures in American history. These compelling essays remind us that historical settings are more than a backdrop.
-- Michael Patrick Cullinane, Dickinson State University
Table of ContentsChapter One - Gotham Remembers: New York Presidential Commemoration from the Confederation Congress Through the Virginia Dynasty
Keith J. Muchowski
Chapter Two - “A Land of Pharaoh and His Plagues”: John Randolph of Roanoke’s Mission to Russia and the Jacksonian Presidency
Olga Akroyd
Chapter Three - “Just Folks?”: Jack Downing, The West Wing, and the Yankee Struggle for “Real America”
Jeff Smith
Chapter Four - William Henry Harrison and the Making of the Politically Imagined American Midwest
Wesley Bishop
Chapter Five - Andrew Johnson: Reassessing the Political Impact of the Tailor from Tennessee
Frederick David Gordon
Chapter Six - A President’s ‘Pilgrimage of the Heart’: Place, Ancestry, and Woodrow Wilson’s 1918 Visit to Carlisle
Sam Edwards
Chapter Seven - “Dear Mr. President: Herbert Hoover & Harry Truman’s Unique Friendship, 1945-1964”
Lisa Payne Ossian
Chapter Eight - “JFK in Dallas: Collective Memory, Media Events, and Don DeLillo’s Libra”
Laura Álvarez Trigo
Chapter Nine - How Barry Goldwater Merged Arizona’s “Rugged Landscape” with “Rugged Individualism”
Ilias Ben Mna
Chapter Ten - “I’m a Southerner”: The Regional Pride and Burden of President Jimmy Carter
D. Jason Berggren
Chapter Eleven - Plains and Simple: The Influences of Plains, Georgia, and Small-Town Nostalgia on Jimmy Carter’s Public Persona
Elizabeth Rees
Chapter Twelve - The Carter Mystique: The Effects of Jimmy Carter's Election on Tourism in Georgia and the South
Giuliano Santangeli Valenzani
Chapter Thirteen - Tennessee Over Texas: How Appalachia’s Shift to Republican Primacy Predated Trump’s Presidency
Thomas J. Cobb
Chapter Fourteen - The American South and Presidential Politics, 1964-2020
Scott E. Buchanan
