In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire

by Alicia Puglionesi Scribner Book Company 04/05/2022, hardcover SKU: 9781982116750   In this "first-rate work of historical research and storytelling" (Kirkus Reviews), four sites of American history are revealed as places where truth was written over by oppressive fiction -- with profound repercussions for politics past and present. Popular narratives of American history conceal as much as they reveal, presenting a national identity based on harvesting treasures that lay in wait for European colonization. In Whose Ruins tells another story: winding through the US landscape, from Native American earthworks in West Virginia to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, this history is a tour of sites that were mined for an empire's power. Showing the hidden costs of ruthless economic growth -- particularly to Indigenous people -- this book illuminates the myth-making intimately tied to place. From the ground up, the project of settlement, expansion, and extraction became entwined with the sp