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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Denkler, Elizabeth. "Sustaining Identity, Recapturing Heritage: Exploring Issues of Public History, Tourism, and Race in a Southern Rural Town.," University of Maryland, College Park, April 2002.
This dissertation examines the complex web of public history, tourism, race, and cultural identity in a rural southern town, Luray, Virginia. This interdisciplinary study draws on the methodologies and literatures of cultural and social history, public history, cultural landscape studies, tourism studies, African American history, and ethnography. This work argues that Luray, which historically has been able to resist large-scale change from tourism and other groups throughout the twentieth-century, and which is currently battling with a recent influx of retirees from the eastern corridor, has also been able to sustain and exhibit its own communal, yet racially exclusive, notions of heritage. Although African Americans are marginalized in the historical narratives and cultural landscapes in Luray, a close look at these texts reveals their substantial social, cultural, and geographical contributions to the history of the town and in the entire Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia. Among these texts, African American heritage and cultural identity have been recaptured through the “Ol’ Slave Auction Block,” a controversial public history site that subverts dominant notions of heritage. This study also explores an overlooked subject-African American tourism in Luray and the neighboring Shenandoah National Park-to suggest that tourism scholarship needs to embrace racial diversity. Finally, I argue that the criteria and methods for how we commemorate in this country need to be expanded so that public history landscapes will include more sites devoted to the history of marginalized groups.
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