Mapping American Culture
Wayne Franklin, Michael Steiner
University of Iowa Press
What connections can be drawn between oral history and the shopping  mall? Gospel music and the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant? William  Carlos Williams's Patterson and the Manhattan Project's secret  cities? The answers lie in this insightful collection of essays that  read and illuminate the American landscape. Through literature and  folklore, music and oral history, autobiography, architecture, and  photography, eleven leading writers and thinkers explore the dialectic  between space and place in modern American life. The result is an  eloquent and provocative reminder of the environmental context of  events—the deceptively simple fact that events “take place.”